Towards the Republic : a study of new Ireland's social and political aims

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EPUBLIC

'

?| STUDV °f
NEW IRELAND'S

SOCIAL ftND

POLITICAL BIMS

BX AODH DE B LAC AM

KIERSEY

PRICE

I

TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC

I

By A. de Blacam

In Irish:
DORNAN DAN. [Lyrics]

In English:

(Shortly)

THE SHIP THAT SAILED
TOO SOON. [Short Stories]

TOWARDS
THE REPUBLIC

A Study of New Ireland's
Social and Political Aims

BY
AODH de BLAGAM

" Pour epater le bourgeois

THOMAS Mj> KIERSEY

PALMERSTON li^^\ GARDENS X

--^4P"
DUBLIN

So

in (Jtlemorg

of
Connoffg

CONTENTS.

PAGE

The Object of this Book . . . ix

CHAPTER

I. — The Secret Ireland . ... 1

II.— The Makings of the Nation . . .12

III.— The Gaelic State . . . .19

IV. — The Workers' Eepublic : Irish Industry's

Aim . . .30

V. — The Workers' Eepublic : Ireland, Eussia,

and Germany — Who Next ? .43

VI. — The Workers' Eepublic : Some Catholic

Authorities . . . . .53

VII. — Away with Parliaments ! . .60

VIII.— On Thinking Imperially . . .68

IX. — Church and State —

I. Orange and Green . . .81

II. Politics a«d Eeligion . . .85

X. — The Moral Necessity of Separation . 98

CEANQAL . 108

THE OBJECT OF THIS BOOK.

THE ideals which are the inspiration of the
advancing Irish-Ireland movement, are summed
up in the Gaelic League's watchword : Ndisiiin
saor Gaedhealach a dh&anamh d'Eirinn : to make a
Free Gaelic Nation of Ireland. The object of this
book is to trace the meaning of the large aim in some
degree of detail. What do Freedom and Gaelicism
mean in " real politics " ?

For completeness of argument, it has been needful
to touch on some obvious first principles. No Irish-
man has doubts as to the justice of the people's cause
and methods in the Land War, but it has been neces-
sary to set forth the people's position in such cases
in order to exhibit the validity of Irish-Ireland's whole
claims. Gaels will have patience with these apologetic
touches, remembering that what is axiomatic truth
to Ireland is " extremism " to the stranger, and blas-
phemy to the Briton.

Many opinions advanced in these pages will be
condemned as "Extremist," and extreme they are
as contrasted with the utterances of your Redmonds
and Dillons, who have been at pains to reconcile
Irish Nationality and English Imperialism, or to mix
oil and water. For almost a century, through the
baleful influence of O'Connell, those who claimed
to speak with the voice of Ireland (all save Parnell)
have glossed over the real meaning of Ireland's case,

x. TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

and have pleaded for " amelioration," or other benefits
such as an English shire might seek. Now that
Ireland has rejected the Anglicisation, Materialistic
Liberalism and Benthamism that O'Connell substi-
tuted for Nationality ; now that a Nation's Rights
are claimed, the most elementary of those Rights
appears " extreme " as compared with the trivial
benefits hitherto begged for.

It thus happens that to assert that the Irish
language must become the medium of business,
culture and social life in Ireland, and that the English
tongue must only be taught to such as have leisure
or need for a second language — and then only as an
alternative to French, German or Spanish (the com-
mercial tongue of the future) — is to startle the Anglicised
Irishman and exasperate our English friends. Yet, if
Ireland is a Nation, and that assumption has been
nominally adhered to even by the Dillons of a degene-
rate generation, it is the most elementary axiom
that her National tongue should be supreme within
her borders, and other tongues studied merely on
their merits.

So, too, with the issues of Self-Determination,
Republicanism, and Separation from the English
Empire. If Ireland is a Nation, she has as much
right to freedom of choice in these matters as any of
the submerged Nations of the Central Empires, and
there is nothing " extreme " in her claims. To describe
Young Ireland's aims as " extreme " is to call
Nationality " extreme," and, indeed, that is the real
claim of English parties, whether Tory or Liberal.*

*0r even Labour, for did not English Labour, with that crass
insolence towards democratic principles which it has not yet
shaken off, declare the other day for " Irish self-determination
within the British Empire" — a contradiction in terms?

THE OBJECT OF THIS BOOK. xi.

Mr. Dillon may ask for anything short of elementary
National Rights, and may play at " Ireland a Nation "
so long as Nationality goes no further than shamrocks
and coarse English songs about Tipperary ; but let
him talk of the application of President Wilson's
principles to Ireland, and the Chief Secretary will say :
" I cannot believe that the hon. member is speaking
seriously." Such a proposal — as Tories and Liberals
and all the great bourgeois conspiracy unanimously
agree — is extremism, revolutionary intransigeancy,
madness, pro-Germanism. " Ireland a Nation " may
be played at, but if ever efforts be made to take it
seriously, England bids her world-wide chorus of
subsidised organs shout it down with one tremendous
roar of pained indignation or ridicule.

It is claimed, then, that there is nothing " extreme "
in this book, unless the claim of Nationality be extreme.
Some opinions expressed have, indeed, taken on a
stronger colour than one would have given them a
year or two years ago. He whose opinions have not
strengthened and clarified since 1916 may be, indeed,
one of those rare and far-seeing folk who were right
in advance, one of those uncompromising heroes who
shaped the course of history. But if he be not one
of that choice band, he must be either dishonest or
impenetrably dull. Average men, who groped with
varying success in the darkness of the days before the
war, now see their path with clearness in the light of
the new world. Many of us whose instincts are con-
servative, and who would by nature shrink from the
great adventurous cast with which so much was won,
find now that all old prejudices and hesitancies must
be put aside. Thus, to many, the Workers' Republic
seemed a vague and even perilous ambition until

xii. TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

most recent days. But now, in the new conditions,
its feasibility and its inevitableness to Gaelic evolution
are as clear to the common man as formerly to the
seers.

The opinions set down in the following pages are not
drawn from official utterances of Sinn Fein and Labour
representatives. They are quite personal, and are
offered as an attempt to describe the view reached
by an average, commonplace individual in the pilgrim-
age of the Nation through these latter years. It is
the first dim view of the Promised Land, whose fair
and long-sought lineaments now charm our eager eyes.

Cuirim mo shaothar fa choimirce naomh na
n-Gaedheal agus toirbheirim mo leabhar do lucht-
oibre na h-Eireann i g-cuimhne Sheumais Ui Chonghaile.

A. DE B.

ATH-CLIATH,

Samhain, 1918.

TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

UJ

CHAPTER I.

THE SECEET IEELAND.

. . . In the dear lost Ukrania
Which is not ours, though our land.

— SHEVCHENKO, national poet of Ukrania

(now a free Republic),

E are witnessing in Ireland to-day one of the
most remarkable national rediscoveries of his-
tory. The sudden change that has come over
the country — the startling progress and triumph of the
Sinn Fein movement — the transformation of the One
Bright Spot into a mightily-resolved nation loudly
demanding that privilege of Self -Determination which is
being bespoken for every other submerged nationality —
these are phenomena for which the labouring imagina-
tion of British statesmen and the Irish Times can find
no explanation save that so patriotically volunteered
by Mr. John Dillon — German Gold.

But it was not to earn payment from some mysterious
paymaster that men of genius in 1916 took the road
that they knew led to a place before the firing squad ;
it was not for a foreign subsidy — even of £400 a year
— that the released prisoners worked with their lives
in their hands and suffered renewed incarceration,
declining food-supplies and correspondence ; it was
not for money that Thomas A she gave his life in
agony ; it was not for any visible reward that men

2 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

were found in every Irish townland ready to brave
the same fate. As we contemplate these three years'
sacrifices — wise or foolish, justified or unjustifiable —
the most hostile critic is impressed. We are impelled
to repeat John Mitchel's protest : " No man proudly
mounts the scaffold or coolly faces a felon's death, or
marches with head high and defiance on his tongue to the
cell on a convict hulk FOR NOTHING. No man, be he as
young or as vain as you will, does this in the insolence
of youth, or the intoxication of vanity."

No, we must look more deeply for the explanation
of the renaissance of Irish National spirit. We must
glance into history for the motive springs of present-
day events. If we do this, we shall find that the
phenomena of to-day are the workings-out of a situa-
tion created 220 years ago.

In our schools history is dated from 1066 — the date
of a battle on the south coast of a foreign country
that had no more significance for Ireland than a battle
in Bohemia. The true turning-points of history for
Irish people are : the Invasion ; the Death of Bruce ;
the Battle of Kinsale ; the Disarmament of the Irish
Nation after the Willia'mite War, and lastly, Easter
Week. It will be noted that the Union is not quoted,
for the truth is that for the bulk of the nation, the
Union was a matter of indifference. The nation
was submerged at the Disarmament (1695) and the
introduction of the Penal Laws, and for the masses
the Union was merely a negligible change in the affairs
of the Ascendancy.

From the date of the Invasion to the Battle of
Kinsale, the struggle between Ireland and England
was a straightforward national war, with no side-
issues. For the greater part of this time England

THE SECRET IRELAND. 3

was a 'Catholic country— in name and profession —
and the struggling powers were of different race,
different language, different laws. At Kinsale, in
1601, the Gaelic chivalry went down, and it appeared
that the Irish Nation, after its age-long gallant struggle,
had seen its last days. English law now ran at last
in Ulster, and with Ulster beaten, England thought
her power secure. The Irish annalists at this time
wrote as though they regarded the nation as destroyed,
and hoped only to save from the destruction the name
and fame of the heroes of the past.

Wonderful is the resiliency of the Irish race. Within
a generation of Kinsale, the nation was in arms again.
In 1641 Ulster was ablaze ; two years later, when the
arrival of Eoghan Rua O'Neill, fresh from his Conti-
nental triumphs, woke confidence in the waverers,
the whole country was up. At Kilkenny a legislative
body displayed an enlightenment in democratic prin-
ciples that was far ahead of England or Europe. But
the issue was now clouded by religion. O'Neill stood
for the nation, and the national aspiration was the
driving force of the Confederation's successes. But
the New Irish were loyal to the English King, and
professed to be standing for the Catholic Faith alone.
Trying to humour them the nation came to its fall.
It is not surprising to Irish readers to read in
Rinnuccini's impressions of Confederate Ireland that
these •' old English Catholics " who stood for a religious
cause and betrayed the nation had little of the devout
faith of the Old Irish, who were fighting for liberty :
political religion has unchanging traits. The Old
Irish failed to make O'Neill king and sever the fatal
link when the chance was theirs, and so, when O'Neill
was dead, Cromwell trampled the land. Now came

4 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

the great expulsions into Connacht. The only repre-
sentatives of the old race to live on in the three provinces
were the hewers of wood to the planters, or the fugitives
in the bogs and stony mountain places. There fol-
lowed the war against William, but this was a war
for an English King, and for the welfare of Irish Catholic
landlords. It had not the magnitude of the wars that
ended at Kinsale, and it was less a national war than
any that had gone before in Ireland. But it gave
the victor the excuse and the means to complete
Cromwell's outlawry of the body of the Irish Nation.
The Penal Code and Disarmament were imposed, and
the submersion of the nation was complete.

It was said during the period of the Penal Laws
that " the law does not presume such a person as an
Irish Catholic to exist." This phrase has been quoted
so often that, through weariness, we have forgotten
its meaning. It was not against Catholics as such
that the Penal Code was aimed : it was intended to
destroy the Gaelic Nation under the cover of religion.
Thanks to the march of civilisation and the* loyalty-
proving of O'Connellised Catholics, the law no longer
discriminates against people who go to Mass, but it
is still true — true in every phase of life — that such a
person as an Irish Gael is " not supposed to exist."
Before the Penal Laws, Irish nationality was never
ignored — the Irish people were always ': the Irish
enemy." But from the enactment of the Penal Laws
down to this day, Irish nationality has been concealed.
Every law, every act of the English executive, every
book written in England, every newspaper, every
politician, and all expressions of the English mind,
have been unanimously directed to fostering the great
lie regarding Ireland : the lie that denies the existence

THE SECRET IRELAND. 5

and authority in Ireland of Ireland's independent
mind and soul.

At the present day, just as truly as when we were
denied the right to practise our religion, we " are not
supposed to exist." The whole superstructure of
English rule in Ireland is based on the assumption that
the bulk of the nation has no rights. Our educational
system is directed by the principle that the children
must have the land they live in concealed from them,
and their minds filled with the ideas, events, aspira-
tions and ideals of a land foreign to their race in every
detail. Our claim to Self-Determination is waived
aside on the plea that we — inheritors of one of the
world's most rich and unique cultures — are but a
domestic province of cockneydom. In the courts of
Ireland, the national language is refused recognition,
and girls are imprisoned and insulted by a coarse con-
stabulary for not giving their names in the form of
a foreign jargon. The elementary right of a trial
secured for all Englishmen by Habeas Corpus simply
does not exist for the Gael. He may be arrested
without warrant, exiled and imprisoned without trial,
slandered without the right to offer a defence. A
Convention of English nominees, drawn solety from
parasite classes in Ireland, lacking any representa-
tive of the principles embraced by the mass of the
nation, is appointed from abroad, and this body is
pointed to as representative of Ireland's mind and
wishes — the mind and wishes of the national Irishman
not being " supposed to exist." Political leaders, a
slave Press, and the clergy of an alien Church planted
among us and called Irish, use the expression " the
nation " — meaning England — with aggressive repe-
titions intended to strengthen the denial of the Gael's

6 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

existence. Everywhere in public life irritating profes-
sions of loyalty to a foreign country, tacit hints and
open sneers, and a whole devil's paraphernalia of
suggestion are used to keep the Gael continually
conscious that he is an outlaw, a person in the wrong,
an interloper, or an inferior. Judges use the bench
to make wordy, unscrupulous attacks upon the ideals
of the people and the people's champions, to talk with
dogmatic assurance of matters of the most highly
debatable kind with the obvious suggestion that
holders of other views are dangerous and worthless
people — those people being the Gaels, who have no
right to opinions. And so justice, law, administration
and the whole bourgeoisie are rightly regarded by the
mass of the Irish people as a big, cumbering, diabolical
imposition.

The most tragic feature of the submersion of the
Irish Nation is, that in course of time and by dint of
oft-repetition of the lie, England persuaded many of
Ireland's own children to accept their past at her
valuation. The measure of the loss of the Irish tongue
was ever the measure of denationalisation. Daniel
O'Connell, who — consciously or otherwise — was the
most effective ally ever England had in this country,
abused his wonderful power in Ireland to induce the
Irish people to adopt the English language. Had he
told them to adhere to their own, they would equally
have followed his advice, and the renaissance of our
own days might have come seventy years earlier.
But when a large proportion of the nation adopted
the foreign tongue, that mass was cut off from the
memories and traditions of nationhood. In the
English tongue it found nothing but falsehood
regarding Ireland. The few Irishmen who had

THE SECRET IRELAND. 7

written in English hitherto had been ignorant of
the splendours of Gaelic literature, and in their writings
the national figures moved like unreal creatures of
the stage. Cut off from Gaelic scholarship, a new
generation accepted without suspicion the estimates
of Ireland offered by Englishmen pledged to the
propagation of the great denial. So utterly was the
sense of separate cultural nationality lost in a single
generation that even great John Mitchel wrote of
English as " our own language." Lalor Shiel, who
defended O'Connell, expressed vehement indignation
at an English statesman's description of the Irish
people as " alien in race, language and religion."
Thus the O'Connellised Nationalist regarded as an
insult what was really the prime claim of Nationality.

To illustrate the amazing forgetfulness of their
past which descended on an Anglicised people, we may
recall that oft-told tale of how, when Thomas Moore
was composing his "History of Ireland" [1839] he
visited O'Curry at the Royal Irish Academy, in company
with Petrie. O'Curry had before him the Books of
Ballymote and Lecain, The Leabhar Breac, The Annals
of the Four Masters, and other ancient volumes. Seeing
this formidable array of dark and time-worn docu-
ments, Moore (writes O'Curry) " looked a little dis-
concerted, but after awhile plucked up courage to open
the Book of Ballymote and ask what it was. Dr. Petrie
and myself then entered into a short explanation
of the history and character of the books as well as of
ancient Gaelic documents in general. Moore listened
with great attention, alternately scanning the books
and myself, and then asked me, in a serious tone, if
I understood them, and how I learned to do so.
Having satisfied himself on these points, he turned

8 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

to Dr. Petrie and said : ' Petrie, these huge tomes
could not have been written by fools or for any foolish
purpose. / never knew anything about them before,
and I had no right to have undertaken the HISTORY OF
IRELAND.' "

Moore's humility has in it something pathetic.
Here was the most notable Irish literary man of his
day suddenly discovering himself to be totally dis-
qualified to speak for or of his country. Imagine an
Englishman who should set out to write a history of
old France from the documents of the English
marauders of the Hundred Years' War, who should
be ignorant of French and should refuse to consult
'all writings by native Frenchmen : what a distorted
picture would he present ! The Gentle France of
history would be as absent from his pages as though
he were writing of Thibet. Yet this is precisely the
plan on which Moore had been working, and the plan
on which large masses of people base their conceptions
of Ireland to the present day. The history of any
country written without the use of the native annals
is not worth the paper it is written on. Yet for a whole
century, Irishmen have relied for their notions of their
past on books written by men with all Moore's ignor-
ance of the real Ireland, and with less than his patriot
instincts and sympathies. So many hundreds of
books have been written by people ignorant of the
language of the land they write of, and ignorant or
contemptuous of the native annals and literature,
that the false story has drowned the truth by dint of
noisy repetition, and to-day quite well-educated people
are found who are ignorant of all Ireland's past save
that insignificant and inglorious section of it which is
concerned with English-speaking people in Ireland.

THE SECRET IRELAND. 9

The awful obscurity into which the essential
features of Irish history fell is emphasised by the
statues set up in the Irish capital. Parnell and Father
Mathew are the only two of Ireland's greatest to be
commemorated. Beside these, there are statues of
men decent and agreeable, like Goldsmith and Moore ;
utterly foreign like King William and Nelson ; insig-
nificant nobodies like the figures in Stephen's Green,
and often bitter enemies of the Irish people and of
morality. But where is Hugh O'Neill, Ireland's
greatest layman ? Where is Eoghan Rua O'Neill
or great Luke Wadding ? Where is Art MacMurrough
or Bruce, or any other Irish King ? Where is Keating,
who stands to Irish letters as Shakespere to English ?
There is, indeed, a handsome Celtic Cross, erected by
Mr. W. M. Murphy, in the grounds opposite the Mater
Hospital, to the memory of the Four Masters, but,
apart from that solitary example, the stranger might
search all Dublin for memorials of the historic Irish
Nation, and at the end be as poor in discovery as if
that nation never was.

Throughout Irish life to-day, the same dreadful
slavish acceptance of England's will stands before us
like the dirt of the Augean stables. Gaelic Ireland,
traditional Ireland, the real Ireland, living its secret
life, is ignored, or recognised only in a perfunctory
way, as when in speeches lip tribute is paid to " the
grand old Irish tongue." In the Irish-speaking
counties, if there be but five per cent, of English speakers
in the congregation, sermons in English are provided,
and the tongue of the people ignored. In Dublin
where, between Intermediate pupils, Gaelic Leaguers
and native speakers, some twenty per cent, of the
congregations can understand and are eager for Irish

10 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

sermons, the national language is used in the pulpit
only on St. Patrick's Day, and then only in a few
churches. Everywhere the story is the same — the Gael
is " not supposed to exist," even by his own people.

Anglicisation has meant that the Gael, hypnotised
by the assurances of all in power, came at last to forget
his own existence. He forgot his past, forgot his
individuality, and so became the will-less, wandering
creature that allowed the Redmonds and the Dillons
to forswear his national rights and declare him the
friend of his oppressor. That which we are witnessing
to-day is the Gael's awakening to a sense of his separate
existence. How the revival came we know. From
the days of Davis and O'Curry, memories have' been
stirring in the submerged people. Historical research,
poetic reminders, literary reconstruction, have recalled
to the nation its individuality. Above all, the language
revival has stirred the deeps of national memory.
The war merely hastened towards completion a process
long at work. The events that followed Easter Week
brought the stirring memories to a sharp point. A
sudden rush of self-realisation brought the nation
back to the attitude of 220 years ago — the normal
attitude of race-consciousness. Now, as then, the
nation knows itself to be the true owner of this island,
and all that is English in these shores to be usurping
and intrusive.

It is natural enough that those who persist to the
present day in denying the Gael's existence, do not
understand what has happened. They, whose minds
are filled with England's might and England's culture,
and who are as ignorant of Irish culture as a blind-
born man of the nature of colour, do not understand
that however highly we respect the achievements of

THE SECRET IRELAND. 11

Englishmen in their own country, we regard all English
institutions, manners, customs, words, and works as
so much annoying lumber in Ireland, so much rubbish
that must be swept out and destroyed so as to enable
us to make of Ireland an Irish island. As a matter of
fact, Anglicised folk probably understand this better
than they pretend. They know well enough — as
their studiously aggressive attitude shows — that they
are intruders, usurping the place of native sovereignty ;
and though they will never admit it, lest their own
claims be destroyed, they are really fully conscious
that the Gael and his rights exist.

The mysterious thing that has happened in our
days is simply that the Secret Ireland has once more
come forth into the light. The submerged people
have risen and asserted themselves. The Gael has
realised himself and has taken steps to convince the
world of his existence. The thoroughness with which
Irish Nationality has been ignored, denied and hidden
adds to the vehemence of the national re-assertion,
while the example of a dozen less notable submerged
nationalities which have won their complete resur-
rection in these Apocalyptic days, has given to the
Gael a hope on which all his energies are bent. For
ages, in his outlawry, he has dreamed of a time when
the power of might should pass and the principle of
public right be restored to the world. His oppressor
to-day is loud in profession of those principles on
which his right to existence and self-development are
based. He thus finds in his hands a moral weapon
with which he will either achieve the Self -Determination
accorded to all far lesser peoples, or, in the alternative,
expose strong England as the most hypocritical mouther
of lies that the world has seen.

CHAPTER II.

THE MAKINGS OE THE NATION.

I conceive that my testimony ought the more readily
to be admitted from the fact I treat therein more par-
ticularly of the Gaels, and if any man deem that I give
them too much credit, let him not imagine that I do so
through partiality; praising them more than is just
through love of my own kindred, for I belong, according
to my own extraction, to the Old Galls or the Anglo-
Norman race.

— KEATING, Preface to History of Ireland.

CHE aim of the resurgent Gael is expressed in the
motto of the Gaelic League : The achievement of
a free Gaelic nation, for Gaelicism is the fount
and origin of all modern Irish Nationalism. Patriotism
has two phases. There is firstly the zeal for liberty
that springs from economic or material oppression.
It was this spirit that animated the Irish Protestant
Republicans in 1798, when Irish freedom was fought
for in the name of the Rights of Man. There is secondly
the innate, God-implanted desire of every spirited
people for self-expression, and patriotism of this
apostolic sort will demand liberty even where slavery
is softened by luxury and disguised. Were Ireland
but a province or a colony, she would speedily become
loyal to the English Empire on the removal of her
economic grievances and the opening up of her material
resources. But because Ireland is a nation by virtue
of her native Gaelic culture, material prosperity only
emboldens her to seek yet further means for self-
expression. It is not true that Irish Nationality

THE MAKINGS OF THE NATION. 13

thrives on grievances— were that so, England would
remove those grievances. It thrives, like all healthy
organisms, on prosperity. The acquirement of the
land, instead of killing the Irish farmers' zeal for
political liberty, created a sturdy, resource-possessing
population doubly eager to get this country completely
into their hands so as to shape it according to the
dream of their hearts and the design of God.

The_sole bond of Irish Nationality, is — and always
.was — the native Gaelic culture^ and whatever the
chanting details may be, the underlying motive of
every strong national movement can be traced to
the restoration of Gaelici-stn-. ITovenK'iiLs and causes
in Ireland may always be observed to succeed_or
fail in proportion as they approximate to Gaelic
tradition—. The existence of the Gaelic norm as the
public ideal is the most unmistakable phenomenon
of Irish life. In proportion as artists work back to
Gaelic origins, so does their work gain in conviction,
colour and success. In proportion as they have read
deeply of Gaelic literature, the work of our poets and
story-tellers possesses for the general Irish public
" grip " and reality. In proportion as our publicists
are absorbed in Gaelic ideals are they trusted and
loved like the Sinn Fein leaders, in distinction to the
distrusted and contemned children of Anglicisation.

It is not to be supposed that Gaelicism is a narrow
racial cause. When we say that all things non-Gaelic
in Ireland are foreign we do not mean that nobody
has any part in Irish-Ireland save people who, like
many folk in Donegal to-day, can trace their personal
descent back to Niall of the Nine Hostages, and thence,
theoretically, to the ancestor of the Milesian race.
We merely mean that the Gael is the normal national

14 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

type, and that divergence of that type is a mark of
foreign influence, interests or allegiance. Indeed,
nobody with an elementary knowledge of modern
racial science would so far err as to suppose that
anything like homogeneity of race exists in Ireland
any more than in any other European nation. Even
an unscientific glance at any Irish assembly will detect
a score of different types. The old mythological
story of the Milesian nation has now long gone by the
board. We know that primitive Ireland was popu-
lated by immigrations from many sources — the earliest
large immigration, that of the Tuatha de Dannan,
being, according to Dr. Sigerson, of a Teutonic origin ;
for did they not come from the North, as Scandi-
navians would, and were they not, Teuton-like, famed
for their musical and magical arts ? As for the Celts,
no one knows who they were, and we know from the
Latin authors that when they populated Gaul they
were already a race of mixed types. We know that
an Ireland - of mixed tribes was compounded into a
nation sometime early in the Christian Era [query :
by the universal change from pasturage to agriculture ? ]
and that the united nation received numerous immi-
grations of Norsemen and Normans, and later of Anglo-
Saxon Englishry.

So long as Gaelic culture remained dominant in
Ireland, all these races were in turn absorbed and
moulded to the national type. In a patriarchal
country, names count for nothing as evidence of origin,
for in such countries nothing is commoner as a social
custom than the legal fiction by which foreigners are
admitted to the body corporate on the adoption of
the clan name. Hence, nobody knows less about his
origin in Ireland than an 0 or a Mac. He may be

THE MAKINGS OF THE NATION. 15

y

descended from any race which ever entered Ireland
before modern times when names were fixed. It is
impossible to estimate, therefore, what proportion of
bearers of Celtic names are of Celtic origin — until such
time as ethnologists shall measure all our skulls,
when surprising conclusions may be looked for. The
possession of a non-Celtic name, again, is no evidence
of non-Celtic ancestry, for Celtic names were for long
illegal, and those who, in the Pale, adopted English
names and entered the towns, thus cutting themselves
from the clan influence, transmitted those foreign
names to later generations. On the other hand, we
find bearers of names like Keating, Nugent, Walsh,
Hackett and Fitzgerald, of known non-native origin,
among the leading classics of Irish literature and the
leading champions of Gaelic nationality.

Hence it is clear that any attempt to base the Irish
Nation on racialism is absurd from the outset. Such
an attempt has never been made by any Nationalist
of authority. Gaelicism, then, is in no sense racial,
and the Gaelic nation offers a welcome to its citizen-
ship to the child of any race if he, living in Ireland,
accepts the sovereignty of the Irish Nation. But for
all this, Gaelicism is none the less real : it is no whit
artificial. We shall see what is the position in Ireland
of the national Gaelic type if we look at the case of
England. That country is populated by even more
mixed races than is Ireland, but there is no mistake
possible as to the existence of the English national
type. Celts, Teutons, Mediterraneans, Slavs, Semites,
and even Asiatics are found among " typical English-
men," eminent in English politics, English letters,
English social hie. A wholly insignificant little tribe
called Angles, which populated a little corner of the

16 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

country, has given its name to the national type,
and probably not five per cent, of the most English
Englishmen have in them a drop of -"Angle" (or
" English ") blood. The English national type, like
the Irish, has drawn its talents from many sources,
but it is an unmistakable reality, with illimitable
resources for absorption and assimilation. The foreigner
who settles in England finds the atmosphere of
the national type strong upon him. In England, he
does as the English. To win the confidence of the
people he lives among, he talks and acts as they do.
His children are indistinguishable from their English
companions. Every virile and free country possesses
this power of impressing the national type upon settlers.
The Frenchified Englishman, the Americanised Jew,
are familiar enough as examples.

Irish Nationalists, seeking a free Gaelic nation,
expect nothing unreasonable when they look for all
citizens of Ireland— of whatever origin — to conform
to the type named after the Gaels, as settlers in England
conform to the type that is named after the Angles.
It is not proposed to achieve this absorption by coercive
means. In national matters, more than in any others,
" the man who complies against his will is of the same
opinion still," and the nation would profit nothing by
seeking to make Irishmen of strangers — -many of whom
in a country mean increased national wealth — against
their will. The Irish State will, indeed, have the
right to demand that all children educated in Ireland
are taught the language of the country, but there all
compulsory measures towards enforcing national culture
will cease. The Gael will rely solely upon the virility
of his culture for its triumph.

Already we see it at work. In former years, when

THE MAKINGS OF THE NATION. 17

the Gael was completely submerged and Anglicisation
stood unchallenged in Ireland, foreigners who came
to Ireland lost their private characteristics to acquire
only the watery English culture propagated by Trinity
College. They saw nothing of Irish-Ireland — paid
heedless ears to stories, maybe, of the alleged indolence
and worthlessness of the "Irish .peasantry" — and
followed the fashions set by the imitation-English
viceregal court. To-day a complete change has set
in. The National University, the Abbey Theatre,
the Anglo-Irish literary movement, the several schools
of National Art ; all these have contributed to make
the native culture the most interesting feature of life
in the metropolis. The intellectual barrenness and
artistic sterility of the Ascendancy in Ireland — Trinity
College has not produced a dozen scholars in all its
history who have left names that the average man can -
recall — are glaringly obvious beside the mental vigour
of the resurgent people, and the stranger in Ireland
finds that Gaelicism alone offers him any matter of
interest or attraction. Hence, all visitors in search of
intellectual, artistic, or social life in Ireland wholly
ignore the Ascendancy classes, and seek the functions
and circles of the national and reviving Gaelic life.
The foreigner* who writes of Ireland writes of Irish-
Ireland : his pen can find no subject of interest in the
doings of the tawdry Castle sets, the art-barren,
cultureless, Unionist classes. Our visitors, thus at
last find the Gael sovereign in intellectual life in Ireland
— as soon, we hope, he will be in economic and social
life. We have won in the mental realm, and the
phenomenon of Gaelic absorption has begun. Only
the other day we heard of a family of Dutch origin,

*Such as Dubois, Treguiz, Mgr. Buonaiuti, etc.

18 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

settled in Ireland, adopting a Gaelic dress for its
name, as but a few years ago it would have adopted
an English form. Everywhere a similar process is
at work. Young men of partially foreign blood, born
overseas, feel the attraction of the resurgent spirit,
and come home from America and the English colonies
to seek absorption in the reviving nation. Ascendancy
people of goodwill desert their class to throw in their
lot with Ireland. Anglicisation sees itself attacked
at every hand, and it has no moral or cultural defence
to oppose to so formidable a foe, or preserve its
unnatural existence.

CHAPTER III.

THE GAELIC STATE.

A Thrionoid 'ga dta an chumhacht,

An mbiaidh an dream-sa choidhche ar deoraidheacht,

Ni is sia 6 chathair-lios Chuinn,

No an mbiaidh an t-ath-aoibhneas againn ?

— FEARFLATHA 0 GNIMH.

CHE Nationalist population of Ireland are the
rightful, though dispossessed, owners of this
island, its harbours, minerals, soil, fisheries,
and stock. It is on this principle that the Gael has
set before himself the aim of recovering complete
economic control of all Irish resources. It is intolerable
that, as at present, the veins of wealth in Ireland
should be governed in foreign interests, by men of a
foreign allegiance, and the true owners of Ireland
exist merely as the wage-slaves of strangers. The
struggle for economic sovereignty has two phases —
the agricultural and the industrial — and it is one of
the principal sources of strength to the Gaelic revival
that in the former of these phases a large measure of
success has already been achieved. In national
matters, success increases the hunger for success.

Our English friends are continually reminding us
that their Imperial Parliament backed the cheque
with which the Irish landlords were bought out, and
the land of Ireland transferred to the possession of
the farmers. An examination of this transaction
shows it to have been far less of an act of supernatural
virtue than is represented. English investors were

20 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

offered one of the finest securities ever placed upon
the market, and have been receiving their interest
ever since, while the Imperial Parliament was relieved
of a difficult problem that had long impeded its
machinery. England's petted class of planters was
given a cash settlement which mightily delighted those
children of Mammon, and while English investors, the
English Parliament, and England's faithful garrison all
derived immense benefits, the entire cost was shouldered
by the Irish farmer. It is well for the Irish farmer jthat
he isjrelieved nfjiayjn£_renit, eithp.rfA.ir nrp.Yt.nri-.innfl.tej
and it is well that^ he has secure tenure of possession.
But it is~ablmrd to say that he is under any obligation
for having restored to him that which is his own.
Had England bought out her planters and handed
over the land to its true owners as a free act of restora-
tion, she would have performed an act of international
equity. But when she performs an act of (comparative)
social justice in calling off her landlords, she makes
sure that the act shall cost her nothing, and that the
injured party whose grievance she is redressing shall
pay — and pay well — for his restored goods.
- — So the Irish Nation, dispossessed of its lands by
Cromwell and the Penal Code, is at last restored a
section of those lands, after an age of rack-renting
and torture by titleless adventurers, backed by Imperial
bayonets. It is granted this small area of its once
wide territories on the condition that 100 millions
be paid over to the thieves who have flourished so
long, and to the English capitalist who expects a big
commission in the form of interest. Every penny that
is taken from Irish farmers for their land is plunder
— a war indemnity — an unjustifiable levy upon the
victims of a marauding excursion. Not one penny

THE GAELIC STATE. 21

received by the Irish landlords is other than stolen
money. The Irish farmers are paying for what is
already indisputably their own.

It is not on the general moral principle that, in
any country, the nation possesses sovereign rights
over the country's resources that we declare that the
farmers are the owners of the Irish soil. This moral
principle is denied by the economic systems of many
states, which declare that a class may justly hold the
monopoly of the nation's wealth. We are prepared
to meet even the capitalist theory of economic morality
with proofs of our case. Setting aside, then, the natural
right of the people to possess the soil, we look back to
the days of the Gaelic State, and inquire who were its
owners then. If we find it owned by a class of native
landlords, from whom it was wrested by the new-
comers, we are obliged to admit that according to
capitalist morality, the Irish farmers have no more
right to the land to-day than they had when it was
owned by its former masters. If the land was owned
by Irish landlords who have since perished, then the
new holders can claim possession by right of pre-
scription, for where one party to a dispute has ceased
to exist, the other party has, by virtue of occupation,
a natural right over claimants from outside, like the
right of the finder of an unclaimed article. When we
examine the landlords' title-deeds, however, we find
in them no such authority.

We find that before the tide of (unprovoked) war
swept the Irish people from their homesteads, the
land was both de facto and de jure owned by the nation
as a communal possession. The Irish farmer enjoyed
perfect security of tenure, and was as much possessor
of the land he tilled as the shareholders of a modern

22 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

company are possessors of that company's assets.
The Brehon law by which this ownership was decreed
and regulated prevailed everywhere until it was sus-
pended by exterior force. No person or power had any
moral or legal right to disturb those possessors, nor
could their land pass to other hands save by their
volunta^ concession. They were driven from their
lands by arms, but they never voluntarily surrendered
their right of ownership, and the intruders never
established any claim save the claim of thieves' might.
It cannot be pretended that any right of prescription
grew with time, for the actual owners, i.e., the nation,
still lived on, eking out existence among bogs and
rocks, and ever seeking the recovery of their rightful
means of decent subsistence for which no substitute
was offered.

As we look back to the communal Gaelic State,
we see in its constitution the explanation of the Gaelic
nation's survival through ages of unparalleled bloody
persecution. The communal ownership of the land
accounts for that sturdy personal independence which
preserved the physical virility of the race, and which,
by giving every man his personal stake in the state,
made settled, patriotic citizens. Under systems where
the farmers are the creatures of large landlords, inde-
pendence, security, expansive virility are less to be
looked for. But it was not alone the fact that every
man had his stake in the Gaelic State that made the
nation so hard to destroy. It was the many-
headedness, as of the hydra, of the Irish constitution
that perplexed the enemy, who knew not where to
strike. It is true that the Irish State of pre-Invasion
days was weak in central authority. Long peace — the
Norsemen round the coast had long softened into useful

THE GAELIC STATE. 23

commercial Irish citizens — had left Ireland careless
of the need for a strong military monarchy, and when
the most unscrupulous and most militaristic nation
of Europe sent ravaging armies into Ireland, there
was a tragic want of ruthlessness in the opposition
that was offered. A strong mediaeval monarchy
would not have been content to pen the invaders
into Dublin ; it would have swept the last intruder
into the sea, and with a strong naval effort carried the
war into the enemy's camp to teach a wholesome
lesson.

And yet this want of centralisation proved, in a
sense, the nation's salvation. Had the Irish State
hung upon central institutions, the destruction thereof
would have meant the nation's destruction. Thus
one great battle might have ended Irish independence.
As it was, the_real bond of Irish ISfatirmality wa,s
enthusiastic loyalty tr> the n,a,tfinrm.l nnltnrft. It was
a spiritual bulwark that no material force could break.
Economically, the state was based on self-supporting
stateships, and before foreign power could establish
itself, each of these stateships had separately to be
reduced. Each stateship had its pasturage, tillage,
lea, wood, and fresh or salt-water fisheries ; in all of
which each of its citizens had his stake. Each state-
ship, again, had its own craftsmen, jurists, physicians
and bards : a complete apparatus for independent
and varied life. Each stateship produced its own
food, clothing, weapons, and cultural ministrations.
The arts and crafts were, so to speak, by-industries
of agriculture ; and hence, so long as the land was
held, the complete life of the Gael could thrive in local
perfection. A nation thus vitally strong in every
part was, as a whole, an organism that could not be

24 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

quelled save by the extirpation of the race. So long
as the people could cling to the soil — and often a clan
swept completely from its holdings won its way back
— the national life continued in almost full intensity,
while the self-sufficiency of every clan made strangers
seek absorption so as to enjoy the civic privileges that
were otherwise denied.

We thus may learn one of the most important
lessons of Irish history, viz., that the national war
was also a social war. The Irish Nation, when truly
Gaelic, fought its battle upon the social plane. J3y
preserving a Gaelic society, the nation survived.
Gaelicism of life was the hardest thing for the enemy
to destroy, and it was only in the last century, when
he partially succeeded, with his National Schools^
(wickedest weapon ever forged) that the nation lost
for awhile resiliency and the power of absorption and
recovery. There is a lesson in this for to-day.
England can deport our politicians, defeat our armed
men, strangle with her censorship our diplomatic
efforts ; but while no means of resistance on our part
is to be discarded because it can in the extreme be
overborne, yet we do well to remember that England's
only argument, Force, cannot prevail against social
endeavour. England cannot prevent us from forming
and preserving a Gaelic society, and in proportion as
Irish social endeavour is united and resolved, the
might of England in Ireland will be rendered nugatory.

Along the western counties, where the Irish language
still predominates, traces of the life of the stateships
linger to this day. There are little groups of parishes
almost completely self-supporting, although imported
food and manufactured goods are now beginning to
penetrate through the accursed gombeen-shops. Here

THE GAELIC STATE. 25

neighbours co-operate to build the houses and make
furniture. The superb bedding, of touch-delighting
woollen texture, and the clothing of the people are
from local looms. The food is mainly the good local
produce— oatbread and heather-honey are there. In
co-operative labours and in a thousand pleasing
social traits, the observer may see relics of a very
different life from that of Anglicised Ireland, and may
cast himself back in vision to the full-blooded Hie of
pre-Famine days, and so to the Ireland of days before
the Dispossession. Here there are literature and
song and social wealth of life nourishing in the Gaelic
tongue, and a happy existence is enjoyed in complete
independence of all the tawdry works and pomps of
the English-speaking world. You may meet strong
farmers who have never heard of John Redmond,
so virile, so self-sufficient, are the surviving fragments
of the Gaelic polity.

Gaelicism is not so artificial a thing that it can
be killed by a break in its continuity. Its principles
are instinctive to the Irish people, and though the
traditional Gaelic State has been beaten back to the
Atlantic verge, its familiar lineaments have strangely
begun to re-appear in the fields that it seemed forever
to have left. The nation having recovered the land
and so acquired security for self-expression, has myste-
riously begun, as we may say, to crystallise out in
its old form. As by some strange avatar the old
economic methods have begun to assert themselves
in modern conditions. Mr. Darrell Figgis, in two
remarkable historical studies, has showed how the
old stateships have, as it were, been re-established
in the co-operative societies into which the emancipated
farmers formed themselves.

26 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

" Irishmen were now " he writes of recent years,
" coming into the possession of their land. They had
won, that is to say, that on which the National Polity
had been built without the power to re-create the State.
Their holdings were small, and in the new world-wide com-
petition they were unable to compete against farming
syndicates all over the world. So the Organisation
Society grouped them into co-operative societies with
a view to giving them a corporate responsibility and
power. And a remarkable thing happened. The new
societies became in many ways the modern counterparts
of the old Stateships. They are (though only in matters
of business) legislative and economic units ; they have
their central townships, where they meet, and about
which reside the artisans of those units ; they enact
their own limited governance of themselves. With
Ireland a Sovereign State it would take very little to make
of them what the Old Stateships had been, and to rebuild
from them the wise and distinctive National Polity that
was once so ruthlessly destroyed."*

That the future of Ireland lies in Co-operation no
observer of the signs of the times can doubt. Every
great revolution of opinion takes a full generation to
effect. The Parliamentary Party and movement
survived a score of blunders — lived on after innumerable
betrayals of trust — because the rising of a new genera-
tion was necessary before a sweeping change of vision
could come to the country. In the meantime, Sinn
Fein — Irish-Ireland — had to wait patiently in the
wilderness. Co-operation, too, had to be preached, as
in the wilderness, for the space of a generation, but
to-day every young man of intelligence, almost as
a matter of course, accepts co-operation as the

* The Historic Case for Irith Independence.

THE GAELIC STATE. 27

progressive policy. The land is passing into the hands
of an intellectual generation completely converted
to the cause. The young farmer, eager, as youth
always is, for the progressive path, reads modern
Irish literature, and finds, every one of the intellectual
leaders of the country preaching co-operation — sees
no one defending the cause of the old regime of traders
who grew rich on selling bad seeds and inferior manures
— save the representatives of an inefficient and dis-
credited party. All the forces of enlightenment
advocate the co-operative cause, and the new generation
has no doubt as to its course.

With Young Ireland resolved to organise the
countryside on co-operative lines, it is to be expected
that the co-operative societies will shortly take on
the complete colour of Young Ireland's ideals and
ambitions. Co-operation, at present solely an economic
movement, will be worked to its full potentiality as
a means for advancing the resurgent Gael's cultural
and social desires. The co-operative societies will
take over the leadership of all communal activities.
As they pass into the hands of the younger men, their
business will, gradually, come to be conducted
in Irish, and the fact that they are controlled by the
democracy will render them friendly to the advance-
ment of Irish in business life, where the capitalist
economic institutions are hostile to the use of the
national tongue. The movement presently afoot to
equip each co-operative society with a rural library
is again indicative of the lead which co-operative
societies are destined to take in promoting national
culture. Only the other day, to take another example
of co-operative activities, we saw the Enniscorthy
society establishing its own cinema. Here we see the

28 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

possibility of Irishising the people's amusements.
In time, every co-operative society will have its hall,
in which the public will enjoy dramatic and other
fare selected by their own folk, instead of being obliged
to accept, as heretofore, the trivial and often offensive
entertainments offered them by foreign and capitalistic
theatrical syndicates. Thus the co-operative societies
may become the most effective patrons of Irish music,
Irish drama and Irish talent that these have ever
enjoyed. We can also foresee the societies inviting
the thinkers and scholars of the nation, and dis-
tinguished foreign visitors, to lecture in their halls ;
and in this, and other ways, leading the restoration of
the democratic culture of old.

When the co-operative societies have thus reached
their full entelechy, when the whole soil of Ireland,
including the rich midlands now held by graziers, is
back in the hands of its owners, either by the payment
of indemnity or otherwise, the control of Irish Me,
so far as the countryside is concerned, will have been
almost completely won back by the nation. But if
Ireland, securing Self-Determination, has won her
independence, these democratic stateships will become
the vital framework of the most distinctive of civilisa-
tions. The National Government, when raising
revenue, will draw from the communal wealth of these
stateships, and so the harsh and unequal incidence
of taxation will no longer fall upon the individual.
The common wealth will pay the common expenses,
and we shall have an end of the present shifting of the
burden by the rich classes to the bourgeoisie, and by
the bourgeoisie to the poor, who have no one below
them to pass it on to. The decentralisation effected
by the stateships will, as of old, keep the professions

THE GAELIC STATE. 29

and the industries healthily in touch with the land,
and, in turn, will keep the farmer agreeably in touch
with other phases of life than the agricultural. Thus
there will be no excessive growth of artificiality in the
towns — no cockney-ising of the youth — and at the
same time there will be no isolation, as at present,
of the farmer from the mobile world, no rustication.
Extreme divergences between classes will be reduced.
The diffusion of small private property, which will
follow a widespread stake in the land, will increase
stability, personal independence and good citizen-
ship. In short, the greater the degree of adhesion to
traditional Gaelic social principles, the greater will
be the beauty, security and nobility of the restored
Gaelic State?

CHAPTER IV.

THE WOBKEBS' BEPUBLIC :
IRISH INDUSTRY'S AIM.

" Capitalism is the most foreign thing in Ireland."

— JAMES COMMOLLT.

MONO the many startlingly swift revolutions
which have been brought about by the War,
there are few more striking than the revolution
of attitude effected in the Irish working class. People
familiar with Dublin before the War who should
re- visit the Irish capital to-day would suppose that not
five, but fifty years had passed, so great a change is
obvious in the attitude and condition of the city's
democracy. The change is not confined to Dublin,
nor to Dublin and Cork, although they lead in the
industrial social movement ; for all through the country
labour is organising with a thoroughness and a deter-
mination that before the war the most sanguine
democrat hardly hoped to live to see. It is obvious
to the student who takes the pains to go among the
people to learn their views, and who reads the literature
of the movement, that Irish labour has envisioned
the aim of effecting in the industrial world the same
recovery of national control as has been achieved —
at least in principle — in the land. The labour move-
ment owes its strength and enthusiasm to the fact
that it has all the driving force of national resurgence
behind it. In the labour movement we see the town-
dwelling Gael fighting the national cause on the social

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 31

plane exactly as his brother in the counties has fought
it. It is not merely because he wants better food,
cheaper fuel, and housing something better than a,
beast's, that the Irish workingman is seeking to link
up the country's labour in " One Big Union " : it is
because he wants to live a completely Irish life — to
rear sturdy Irish children — to share with the men on
the land a common Gaelic heritage. His inspiration
is seen in the phrase in which James Connolly so
vividly described the true nature of the democratic
movement : " The Re-Conquest of Ireland"

The bullet that killed James Connolly slew also
the Capitalistic Order. It sanctified labour with a
martyrdom, and damned labour's enemies with a
mortal crime. Whether it is agreeable to our wishes
or not, we have to recognise that the doctrine of James
Connolly has completely conquered industrial Ireland
since his death. His work has also affected develop-
ments in Russia and Revolutionary Germany, and
may yet show its fruits in France, America and
Australia. This is a big saying. Yet it is known
to all that the Bolsheviks, the only protagonists in
the great world- struggle who performed a great act
of renunciation in the name of Conscience, Justice
and Liberty, were led by men who studied Connolly's
writings and watched his career. Just here we are
not concerned with Connolly as an international
force, or the influence of the Irish Insurrection upon
the world. But it is necessary to observe that Connolly,
besides being an Irish leader, was a man with a political
creed of historic importance. His formula of a
Workers' Republic has set Republicanism on a hope-
fuller path than that which it has trodden in France
and America. What is most interesting of all is,

32 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

that after he had formed his political creed, Connolly
examined Irish history, and found the cause of Irish
Nationalism to be historically in harmony with the
social principles that he had deduced from unirersals.
In other words, he found that the great heroes of
Ireland's cause had always been men acting in accord
with the aim of social justice. He examined the
Gaelic State, and found it to have been in the past an
actual embodiment of the State that he was seeking in the
future. Hence, from beginning with formulas neces-
sarily of a somewhat doctrinaire character, he came
to declare, not that the Irish people must construct a
state on such-and-such theoretic lines, but that they
must restore their native and submerged constitution.
This I take to be his mental attitude as traced from
his early propaganda to his great final testaments,
Labour in Irish History and The Re-Conquest of Ireland.
It is regrettable that we have no Credo from the
pen of the " ultimate " Connolly. No close student
of the times can doubt that Connolly was one of the
pillars of new Europe ; that his influence will prove as
great as, though more salutary than, that of Rousseau.
Hence, we could wish that in that epoch-making
Spring of 1916 he had set down a considered testament.
We know at least that love of Ireland and earnest
sincerity had brought him to a position in regard
to Nationalism that cancelled many of his early and
groping theories, and made him perfectly orthodox
in attitude towards Irish spiritual tradition. We
know, too, that his comrade-in-arms at the last,
Padraic MacPiarais, that great representative figure
of Irish Catholicity, whose writings are eminent in the
Catholic literature of the age, had adopted Connolly's
creed, so that Connolly's faith is sealed, not only by

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 33

his own, but by the ratifying blood of the Coluracille
of our days. Connolly's Republic was proclaimed
in Easter Week by men who were as representative
of Catholic tradition as if they had learnt from the
lips of Brigid and Breandan. The creed of the
Workers' Republic was signed by the true children
of Holy Ireland of old.

When he spoke in the international vocabulary,
Connolly said : " We seek a Workers' Republic." When
he spoke in Irish terms, he said : " We want the free
Irish State of old restored." The phrase " Workers'
Republic " is an excellent modern translation of
Gaelicism. It enables us correctly to grasp the plan
of old Irish civilisation, and Irish history in turn
throws light on the possibilities of modern Labour-
Republicanism. Thus we are often told that advanced
Labour's aim of securing communal possession of
the national wealth would result in the insecurity of
the individual for want of personal property. Yet
the example of the Gaelic State shows that when the
national wealth is owned by the nation, it is possible
for the most stable and widely-diffused personal
security to exist. Never was the farmer more firmly
set in his holding than when he was unable, on the
one hand, to amass more land than his share and
reduce his rivals to being his tenants, or to alienate
their share from his family on the other. The example
of old Ireland shows us, further, that even where the
power to expropriate the means of production from
the people, and to destroy their personal independence
is denied to the capitalist, it is still possible for the
fortunate individual, through industry, genius, or
public gratitude for services, to amass legitimate
objects of enjoyment, and enjoy as jolly a life as the

34 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

world can offer. One luxury is to be prohibited
hereafter — the luxury of power. The arbitrary power
to make or mar the happiness of thousands is forever
to be removed from the rich. The luxury of being
able to unsettle the lives of scores of workers, to fill
homes with anxiety, to tear up rooted associations,
to sway markets, to overthrow the labours of patriots
by impoverishing districts and shifting the economic
balance hither and thither — this is to be denied, like
the luxury of furious driving on the public road.
But this does not necessarily mean that no one shall
enjoy rare wines, big houses, gardens, costly books
and the means of travel.

The aim of Irish Labour — to take over from foreign,
anti-Irish and usurping powers the commerce and
industry of Ireland — is this Socialism ? Reactionaries
storm at the movement, quoting all the shibboleths of
Anti-Socialistic theory. The workers are being led
astray by evil teachers, are being betrayed into conflict
with rightly-constituted authority, are seeking what
is not their own. These are the cries. The same
were raised against the United Irishmen, the Land
Leaguers, the Fenians, the Parnellites and Sinn Fein :
against every party, in fact, which has stood for the
submerged nation, and which time has justified. But
those who attack Irish Labour, rarely do their opponents
the compliment of studying their case. In conse-
quence their accusations fly wide of the mark, and
are rightly disregarded by the nation, strong in the
conscientious knowledge of the justice of its cause.
Mr. Thomas Johnson, a brilliant upholder of Connolly's
faith, said but recently that when he was asked whether
he was a Socialist, he knew not what to answer, for the
practical work of the rapidly-advancing Labour cause

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 35

so completely absorbed the attention, that the brain
was never troubled with the academic problem of
whether this or that label was proper to the measures
which the course of events directed Labour to take.
That is the attitude of Irish Labour — an attitude of
complete indifference to formulas.

Nothing could be more futile in the opponents of
the Labour uprising than to seek to check it with the
bonds of academic argumentation. If any dogma of
theorists stands in the way of the nation's march,
so much the worse for the theorists. The nation sees
the road clearly before it. But when we examine
the theoretical problem : Is it Socialism ? we find, on
the whole, that there need be no particular anxiety
on that score. Connolly, who gloried in the name of
Socialist, had the most eclectic of minds. He drew,
not from one school of Socialism, but from all sources
that could prove serviceable to the case of Ireland.
So far from seeking to impose on Ireland the rigid
doctrine of any special Socialistic school, Connolly
was prepared to welcome any movement that would
advance his central purpose — the restoration of
economic Ireland to the dispossessed Irish masses.
Thus he strongly advocated the Agricultural Co-
operative Movement, and himself used with approval
the co-operative leader's formula of " a Co-operative
Commonwealth." He accepted this phrase as a
synonym for his own " Workers' Republic." No
mere doctrinaire would be thus liberal. Connolly was
a follower of Marx, the classic of Socialism, in hoping
for the overthrow of the Capitalist Order. Yet he
was also a follower of Thompson, the Irishman who
founded Socialism, whose formula was : that the
workers must be their own capitalists, a doctrine that

36 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

paralyses Anti-Socialistic reasoning. Thus, Connolly
was not concerned to pledge Ireland to a theory. His
plan was to work along whatever roads proved open
towards the substitution of the People's sovereignty for
the sovereignty of the nationless capitalist. Connolly
stands or falls, not by the theory of Socialism, but by
the ideal of Popular Control, however it be achieved.

It follows, then, that academic denunciations of
Socialism such as are given prominence from time
to time in the newspapers, have no bearing upon
the real problems of the hour. We take a typical
utterance of an opponent of the movement inaugurated
by Connolly. The speaker, states the report, " said
that labour had a perfect right to combine to safeguard
its interests, and so had employers. All the labour troubles
we had now were due to the Reformation, which destroyed
the Christian guilds (first started by the Dominicans in
Italy), making them give place to competition between
wealth at the top and misery at the bottom. . . . Those
who wanted to interfere with peace and social order must be
put down. . . . Labour had no right to organise itself
to interfere with the rights of other classes in the Nation."

Let, us examine this characteristic example of the
attacks which are made every day upon Irish demo-
cracy. Passing over the question of the origin of the
Christian guilds, let us observe first that the guild
system did not exist in the Gaelic State. The abolition
of guilds, therefore, had no effect on Irish history.
Guilds existed only in the English Pale and other
Anglicised centres. 'The mass of the nation's industry
was conducted without them. Is it not, then, verging
on the preposterous to admonish the Irish Nation for
the faults of other lands ? Thus the attackers of Irish
National movements ever ignore (like the Penal Code)

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 37

the existence of the Irish people and their personal
history.

As to the alleged merits of the guilds, which throve
in England, it is a well-known fact that they proved
economically inefficient. Religion had nothing to do
with their disappearance. They upheld apprentice-
ship and maintained a good standard of work — like
trades unions. But in origin they were workers'
unions formed to combat merchants' (or capitalists')
unions, and once they were established they proved
as tyrannous as the merchants' associations before
them. They exploited their monopolies to the full :
that was the cause of their fall. We read that in
Coventry once, the barbers agreed to raise their prices
" to the damage of the whole people," and the one
honest man who declined to profiteer was threatened
with violence and " brought before a spiritual court
to answer for his treason." Some dyers in the same
town once refused to be bound by the guild's rates,
and that most religious body " hired Welshmen and
Irishmen to waylay and kill them" So far from
serving the state loyally, we read of the guilds that
in the sixteenth century, the joiners and carvers of
Chester, instead of supplying the citizens at fair prices,
" sold their wares to Ireland and other places beyond
the sea at unreasonable prices, to their own enrich-
ment and the community's expense." The guilds
again refused membership to strangers and yet denied
the strangers the right to work. Thus in the fifteenth
century the guilds of Bristol excluded aliens and
" rebels of Ireland." Bristol was then as Irish as
Liverpool is to-day, but here was English democracy
declaring " No Irish need apply."

From these examples it is clear that the so-called

38 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

" Catholic Guilds " of England, with which efforts
are made to side-track Irish Labour from Irish ideals,
had developed during the Middle Ages into unscrupu-
lous monopolistic institutions, displaying all the
arbitrary and anti-social abuses of power which to-day
we object to in capitalism. They quarrelled one with
another and, according to the opinion of many,
tended to restrict the volume of national production.
At least, guildless Ireland produced such good and
cheap cloth in the Middle Ages that guild-constituted
England had to resort to arms to destroy the rival
trade. Cloth was then the principal commodity of
exchange, and Ireland's Continental cloth trade was
attacked by an English navy. The essential fault of
the guild system of society was, as all authorities
admit, the fact that the guild- member's public spirit
was li mi ted by his trade. He thought of and worked
for the enrichment of the bootmakers, if he was a boot-
maker, and he cared little how ironworkers or
hatmakers fared — tried, indeed, to benefit by their
misfortunes. Under the Gaelic system, the clothworker
did not look for succour in distress to brother cloth-
makers, but to the stateship to which he belonged.
When a man looked outside himself, it was not to an
artificial corporation, like a trade guild, but to his
natural brotherhood, the community. This placed
public spirit in the place of trade jealousy, and bound
together farmer, artisan, and professional man in the
sense of a common heritage. That trade societies
must exist in the modern world is obvious, but Irish
Labour's ambition of federating all the workers of
Ireland into " One Big Union " means that the evils
of guild sectionalism shall not appear in the new
Gaelic State. The union of unions will keep before the

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 39

nation its substantial solidarity, and the principle
that an injury to one is an injury to all.

So far from the guilds having anything to do with
Irish history, so far from them having been destroyed
by the Reformation, we see that they concerned
Ireland not at all. But observe the suggestion that
the Reformation is responsible for Ireland's economic
ills. Here we have another characteristic attempt
to side-track the democratic movement with a false
suggestion. The Reformation had no more to do
with Ireland's economic case than had the spread of
Buddhism in Japan. For whatever the Reformation
may have done in England, this is certain, that Ireland's
economic troubles all date from the expropriation of
the Irish race — the overthrow of the Gaelic State
by the attempted extirpation of the Irish people.
The vitality of the state was such that all efforts to
suppress it failing, England decided to wipe out the
population in which it lived. And attempts to put
this policy of extirpation into effect were first made
by the Catholic English Queen Mary, the mortal
enemy of the Reformation. It was she who first began
the God- defying and murderous policy of expropria-
tion, clearances and plantations — the policy finally
brought to perfection by the Penal Code. Apart from
the fact that Ireland's most relentless enemies have
always been found in the ranks of English nominal
Catholics, the fact that the destruction of the Irish
State was first taken in hands by " Bloody Mary "
is sufficient evidence that the Reformation has nothing
to do with our affairs. To talk of the Reformation
in regard to Irish Labour, merely amounts to an
attempt to substitute sectarian hatred for historical
fact and practical politics.

40 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

Much use is made by the Anglicised bourgeoisie of
sectarian cries. Thus Connolly's occasional tussles
with Catholic publicists are being continually referred
to. Controversial phrases of Connolly's are flaunted
in the face of the Catholic worker by those who have
no sympathy with his national and social aspirations,
in hope of terrifying with the suggestion that
Connolly was a bad Catholic and a teacher of anti-
Catholic doctrine. This policy is treachery to the
Church. No course of action could do more to create
distrust in the worker's mind. Conscience and reason,
all the most-deep-seated instincts of the Irish nature,
tell the worker that his objects are just and right.
When men of authority and learning accuse him of
heresy in theoretic terms that he cannot grasp, he is
dangerously bewildered. When he is told that Catholic
guilds, such as Ireland has never heard of before, are
the remedy for his ills, and that he must forsake the
path before him that he knows to be right, he is doubly
perplexed. It is then that the Red-Flaggery of your
jejune Revolutionist begins to sound reasonable.
When right authority sides with wrong authority
it commits a suicidal act.

To preserve our people from rash Red-Flaggery,
though the danger is very small — the Irish people's
good sense and deep faith have preserved them from
this peril in their other struggles — it is much to be
wished that an Irish Lacordaire should arise to
champion in high places the workers' cause. He
would show, in the terms of learning, the vital justness
of the resurgent nation's aims. We claim that those
aims are perfectly in accord with the Moral Law and
with Catholic Social Philosophy. No one has claimed
for Connolly " verbal inspiration." Many of his

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 41

controversies and contentions are by many regretted.
But it is a true proverb that says : " He who never
made a mistake never made anything else," and in
all the essential, substantial features, we claim that
Connolly's teaching is acceptable to the most orthodox.
We claim that " Catholic Social Reform " must, in
the very nature of the case, be based upon the basic
principle of Connolly's teaching — the Re-Conquest
of Ireland. Justice cannot exist in a state that is rooted
in injustice. Without re- conquest, reform cannot begin.
The first act of Catholic Social Reform, therefore,
must be to throw itself into the re-conquest struggle.
The Land War was a piece of Catholic Social
Reform of the most practical kind. When the Turks
swept into Christendom, stamping out the Christian
State, murdering and exiling the Christian population,
King John Sobieski, leading the armies of Catholic
Poland, drove back the infidel hordes before the
heart of Christendom could be pierced. Sobieski
died, and Poland's military power ended. But all
Catholic historians join in praising her great struggle
against the Turk as a holy war. Now there was not
one detail of formal difference between Poland's war
against the invading Turks and Ireland's war against
the invading landlords. Both were fought by good
Catholics to drive out the enemies of civilisation from
the threatened Christian State, for the securing of
the Christian community in its home. Catholic
formulas were not much used in the Irish war, for it
is not the Irish way to make a parade of principles.
But if the salvation of a Catholic community from
extermination by invading thieves be not a Catholic
cause it is hard to imagine circumstances worthy of
that name. The holy intentions of the Irish people

42 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

in the struggle are seen in the self-sacrifice, the risk,
the restraint and the courage with which the guerilla
war was fought. Guerilla war, like insurrections,
and strikes and other appeals to force, is to be resorted
to only with the gravest circumspection, because of
the temptation that is offered to irresponsible violence.
But it stands eternally to the honour of the Irish
people, and as evidence of their firm respect for the
Moral Law, that in their guerilla war, the enemy
garrison was never shot at save in the *' way of
business." There was no disorderly violence, no act
of personal revenge. In any other country, the police
and other spies who gave Irish citizens into the hands
of the enemy garrison would have fallen victims to
the vengeance of the bereaved.

The industrial movement, as has been pointed out,
is the town phase of the same holy war as the struggle
for the land. It is thus, in its essence, a cause in
accord with the principles of Justice and Right. But
it is not, like the land war, a fight against individuals.
The employers are not in the position of the landlords.
The artisan dismissed from employment can, theoreti-
cally at least, secure employment elsewhere. He is
not like the land tenant who, deprived of his holding,
was torn from the very roots of his existence as an
Irish citizen. The industrial quarrel is with a foreign
system imposed on the Irish people and their country,
by which self-realisation of the nation is rendered
impossible, and the control of Irish wealth invested
in anti-Irish powers. With an object in view, then, the
achievement of which will be a victory for Christendom,
and firm in the resolve to achieve it by moral means,
the Irish democracy resents with bitterness attacks
made upon its purposes in the name of ethical theory.

To develop this we must start another chapter.

CHAPTER V.

THE WOEKBRS' EEPUBLIC :
IRELAND, RUSSIA, AND GEBMANY — WHO NEXT?

. . . Of the great European political edifice there
shall not rest a stone upon a stone. For the seat of Liberty
shall be changed. . . . Sow ye then the love of the
Fatherland and the spirit of sacrifice, and be certain that
there shall spring therefrom a fair and great Republic.

— THE BOOK OF THE POLISH PILGRIMS.

IT is an excellent thing that workers should be
exhorted to moderation, charitableness and equity.
It is also desirable that the rich should be reminded
of their duties to their employees. But to wait for
reform until Christian charity shall govern the acts
of the rich classes, would be to act on the principle of
" Live, horse, and you'll get grass." Lectures on
moral duties addressed to a tiger would be a poor
means of defence ; and not much is to be hoped for
from appeals to the moral sense of a class which owes
its position to immoral operations. So far from
Labour — which is the body of the nation — having
" no right to interfere with the rights " (i.e., monopolies
and privileges) of the present capitalistic class, the
fact is that the nation which gave these people their
wealth and power has the right to drive them forever
from the positions which they have so hideously
abused. The Capitalistic Order has been tried. It
has trampled on art and virtue, and has favoured
craft and cunning. It has made the basest qualities
the most profitable, and has left refinement to languish
and genius to beg. Its rich men are the crafty

44 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

honest ability is offered none of its rewards. It was
a social experiment and has failed. Society has the
right to cast it and its machinery aside.

The individuals of the Capitalistic Order have a
right to consideration in the substitution of a new
order. But in Ireland this right is very small. The
basis of wealth in this country is plunder. The rich
classes are largely those who were set up by the con-
fiscation of the Irish Nation's goods. In the second
phase, wealth has been amassed by the exploitation
of the dispossessed people. Where free institutions
are lacking, and unemployment is rife, the masses are
the easy victims of the adventurer. An unprotected
people has been obliged to buy all its goods at prices
above " just value," and wealth has been amassed
by advantage taken of the plight of the people. Thus,
business houses by the score have been raised in Dublin
on the foundation of wickedly-underpaid labour, the
nation being thus doubly robbed. Thirdly, the
iniquity of Irish wealth has been added to by the fact
th^t till recent times it has been almost impossible
for a Catholic Nationalist to earn a good salary or set
up in business without first selling his principles.
Unless he saluted a flag which he knew to be piratical
and cut himself off from his race, he was ostracised
and ruined. It therefore happens that only a small
minority of commercial concerns exist in Ireland
which have not been founded with stolen capital,
or built up on underpaid labour and over-priced
goods and bartered principles. Confronted with a
bourgeoisie so base in origin, the Gael is not surprised
to find that he has to deal with one of the most
unscrupulous, unintelligent and cruel of vested classes.
No bourgeoisie in Europe is more materialistic than

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 45

the Irish — none voider of public spirit, none more
barren of fruits meet for repentance. All remember
that historic indictment of the " Masters of Dublin "
in " .ZE's " Open Letter in the Great Strike year. He
accused them of being uncultivated — proved by their
utter ignorance of cultured things. Of being incom-
petent— as shown by their dwindling enterprises.
Of being bad citizens — none were found to endow
their city as is done with pride by the merchants of
other lands. Of immorality — they had grown rich
amid scenes of bestial poverty unequalled, while
doing nothing with their wealth for the victims around
them. Of savagery — for they sat in council and
decreed that a city should starve ere a Union be recog-
nised. Of insolence — for they cast aside the rights
recognised in every other state.

It is not the greatest employers who are the worst.
There are a few big employers who pay fair wages,
like the efficient business men of other lands. But
the overwhelming majority, with their semi-efficient
concerns, are relentless, narrow- browed, irredeemable
exploiters. This is not invective. It is history.
Against the nation's resolve to sweep away a system
that leaves such a class in the place of power, it is
urged that the ideal is impracticable. Capital
and Labour, Employers and Employed, will always
exist ; the order cannot be changed, says the bour-
geoisie's defender. Let us examine this.

In the ancient world slavery was universal : the
absolutely normal basis of political institutions. The
greatest philosopher of those ages, Aristotle, drew all
his political theories from the assumption that slavery
(the use of " animated tools ") would always exist,
as a natural outcome of human nature. So persistent

46 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

was this conviction, that in the thirteenth century we
find the greatest of Catholic philosophers, St. Thomas
Aquinas, regretfully following Aristotle in the belief
that human chattels would always be bought and sold.
Yet Christianity succeeded in abolishing throughout
the world this horrible enormity.* Serfdom suc-
ceeded slavery on the Continent. (Ireland escaped
till the new serfdom of the Penal Code was devised).
And so firmly did serfdom hold the masses in Feudal
centuries, that all mediaeval Catholic philosophers
write in the full conviction that " men " will always
be subject to " lords," i.e., tenants with no power to
move so long as they live from the estate they are
born in, obliged to render armed service in whatever
cause their arbitrary master may choose to fight.
All the philosophers were as firmly convinced of the
permanence of serfdom as Aristotle was of that of
slavery. But unforeseen events smashed the whole
institution of serfdom in its turn, and the masses
secured a further concession of liberty. The worker
now had — though circumstances reduced its advan-
tages— freedom of contract. He could move where
he liked, if employment was available, and had no
insuperable barrier to prevent him bettering his
position. Wage slavery, indeed, ensued, when the
exploitation of the New World and other great reser-
voirs of newly-discovered wealth began to near
exhaustion. This evil has many of the traits of slavery
and of serfdom, but it must be candidly admitted
that, except in extreme cases, it is not so terrible as
either. The workers' chain has lengthened. Now

* The hideonsness of slavery is scarcely realised by modern
readers. In the years of Rome's highest culture, it shocked no
one for a hundred slaves to be put to death for the disobedience
of one.

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 47

to declare that wage-slavery must remain forever is
obviously unphilosophic in view of the explosion of
similar gloomy prophecies as to slavery and serfdom
— prophecies not made lightly, but by the greatest
thinkers of the world. Twice changes have come
that the wisest thought impossible. It would be
foolish to suppose that a third and feebler bond than
the others could not be broken.

We therefore see nothing impossible in the abolition
of the Capitalistic Order — least of all in Ireland, where
we have the example of a non- capitalistic and suc-
cessful state in our history. Nor do we see aught
illegitimate in our aim. Capital acquires its power
over the destinies of the people, not by the productive
labour of the capitalist — no individual could produce
half-a-million of wealth by his innate productive
energy — but by the impersonal multiplication of
figures. When Catholic economics ruled the world,
not only did the Canonists demand that goods should
be sold at their " just value " instead of their fortuitous
market rate — thus preventing all those excessive
profits of fortune on which the capitalist to-day relies
for his lucky increases of wealth — but they also forbade
usury, or interest on money, on the principle that money
was not an organic thing like an animal or the soil,
to be able of itself to produce. The plain man cannot
see why, if usury was immoral in the Middle Ages,
a check placed on the power of money to go on multi-
plying at the expense of the workers' liberty should
be unjust to-day. He even ventures to hold that
his war on Capitalism is the modern embodiment of
the Canonist's aim. He contends that the doctrines
of the " just price " and the injustice of usury, were
intended to check exactly the abuses which he now
attacks. He finds in the Canonists, allies.

48 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

Finally, the Irish democrat rejects the charge
(advanced by the reactionaries from their arsenal of
Anti-Socialistic arguments) that the Workers' Republic
will abolish that practice of Private Ownership which
the famous Social Encyclical of Leo XIII. declared
to be necessary to a stable and just order of society.
We have already exposed the falsity of the allegation
that the Workers' Republic or the Gaelic State would
deprive the individual of reasonable enjoyment of
the world's good things. But we go farther, and assert
that the national ownership of Ireland, and the pro-
duction of wealth by co-operative endeavour — these
in the sense of the Gaelic State of former times, and
hence of the Workers' Republic for to-morrow — will be
found in no particular to conflict with the principles
of property set forth by the great Papal Letter.
Criticising Socialist doctrinaires, Leo XIII. points out
that those who till the bare soil, make that which was
wild, fruitful ; their labour has been mingled with the
land till in the cultivated form they are indistinguish-
able. " Is it just that the fruit of a man's own sweat
and labour should be possessed and enjoyed by anyone
else ? As effects follow their cause, so it is just and
right that the results of labour should belong to those
who have bestowed their labour." This penetrating
criticism is directed against those who would make
of all productive workers mere tenants or employees
of the state — civil servants with no place of their
own. This is not sought by the Gaelic State. The
Irish farmer is to hold his land with undisputed tenure,
though he shall not own more than he can work, at
the expense of landless men. It is not proposed to
interfere with his liberty to use the land how he likes
— to order him to grow oats or barley ; nor to restrict

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 49

his choice as to the disposal of its fruits. He will
adapt his private activities to the prevailing Co-
operative Order, not because he will be forced to,
like a slave, but because to harmonise with the National
ideal will, in the future as in the past, be the most
beneficial and attractive course open to the individual.
National sovereignty in national wealth will not
deprive the individual of that use and control of
property that amounts to ownership.

We submit that this offers the farmer all the benefits
of property as defined in the Encyclical. But the right
to abuse property is to be refused him. No Catholic
economist has ever denied that the state has the right
to check the disposal of goods within its realm, to
prevent anti-social uses, and to safeguard the interests
of the community. To take an extreme example: it
has always been held that were the farmers to cease
tillage and leave the community without food, the
state could justly override the farmers' normal right
to do what they liked with their land. The necessity
of the people overrules all personal rights. Again,
so far from private property possessing sovereign rights,
the Canonists declare that the relief of poverty is a legal
obligation. The possessor of goods may not, in the
presence of necessity, deny them to those who need.
Should he refuse to relieve the poor, the state may
assert control of his possessions. Hitherto, in the
interests of capital, which besides engrossing wealth,
has engrossed political power, the rights of private
property have been one-sidedly emphasised. Sove-
reignty has been claimed. The obligations of property
have been obscured and the rights of the community
ignored. Labour proposes merely to redress the
balance — to establish the rights of the community

50 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

as well as the liberty of the individual. The Workers'
Republic will not destroy private possessions, but will
assert, with the Canonists, their limitations, and the
right of the community to control them. Its advocates
claim, therefore, to be working for objects quite in
accord with what is permissible to a Catholic people ;
nay, to be the champions of Catholic Reform.

States and social orders that fall always contribute
to their own defeat by lethargy, indifference, stupidity
or stubbornness. If the capitalist class in Ireland
finds itself suddenly overthrown, it will have but
itself to thank. At present it ignores Labour —
refuses to suppose Democracy to exist. This is fatal
Democracy to-day has in it the same force as the
Land Movement or Sinn Fein. If it is ignored, it
will suddenly achieve as sweeping and revolutionary
a change as those two movements. A mighty surprise
is in store for the ostrich- headed bourgeoisie. But if
there be wise or conscientious employers in Ireland,
they may escape the destruction that threatens their
class by compounding with the resurgent nation.
Let them cease to seek huge percentages of profit,
such as double their capital at a rapid rate, while their
workers live from week to week on weeks' earnings,
never growing richer for their labour, which is the
fertiliser of capital. Let the workers be offered a
share in profits bearing an exact ratio to the employers'
profits. Let them, too, be partly paid in shares in
the enterprise, and given ownership and a voice in
direction. So may the employers become organic
parts of the Irish Nation as the landlords might have
done. Let it be remembered that all constitutions
appear more rigid on paper than they work out in real
life. Even the Capitalistic Order has allowed co-

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 51

operative enterprises to exist and flourish. So, too,
the Workers' Republic will not subdue the nature
of humanity and impose an utter uniformity. The
prevailing order under Capitalism is anti-social. That
order, which creates slums and slave-minds, and pollutes
social life, must be replaced by an order more in
harmony with prevailing needs. But it is quite con-
ceivable that while the main industry of the country
will be in the hands of industrial republics, there will
be many a case of a big private enterprise under a
patriotic and able director. Yet the place which
really able business men of the Capitalist Order — and
there are exceedingly few of such among the inefficient
employers of Ireland — may seek in the Workers'
Republic, is that of great entrepreneurs, or enterprise-
directors, in which position they will be honoured
and well-rewarded servants of the Commonwealth.

The change which is coming to Ireland is coming
to all Europe. To defend the Capitalist Order is to
seek to keep out the tide with sand. For good or ill,
it is going. In Ireland, the change is but a return
to the Gaelic State. For the rest of Europe it is a
great experiment actuated by the workings of natural
impulse. The reason for the difference is obvious to
the student of history. In Ireland, the native social
order which lived on till the submersion of the nation,
and lived even then as an ideal and objective, was an
order of immemorial age. It was evolved from the
Natural Law in the almost-innocent ages of pastoral
and early agricultural life, and being a natural organism,
it adapted itself to new conditions — such as the coming
of Christianity, of navigation and of organised com-
merce— with that easy response to new needs that a
natural organism alone can display. The Capitalistic

52 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

Order was imposed on Ireland violently from without,
and the submerged nation was even denied the right
to practise industry according to Capitalistic rules.
The Capitalistic State was ever as foreign to the nation
as its chains. But on the Continent, the natural
state- organism, so familiar to us in Ireland, is scarcely
even a memory. In the distant ages, the so-called
Barbarians enjoyed free and natural institutions,
finely- devolved Republican manners, like those of the
Irish State ; but when these Barbarians swept down
on the Roman world and founded the nations of
modern Europe, they broke with their native sim-
plicity. They attempted a compromise with an alien
order. They were unable to control a vast artificial
organisation like the Empire (though Charlemagne
made an eternally-glorious effort) on the basis of their
homeland liberties, and so in those tumultuous con-
ditions, Militarism got control, and under the usual
militaristic pretence of restoring order, Feudalism was
founded. The Roman Empire had been sustained
by vast industrial armies of slaves. Feudalism now
administered Europe, with the Barbarian democracy,
reduced to serfs, in their place. Feudalism, with its
lords and barons, yielded to Capitalism, an equally
unnatural and in essence Militaristic Order, and the
serfs became wage-slaves. The rise of Workers'
Republics in Europe is the people's uprise against the
unnatural despotism to which they fell victim a thousand
years ago. It is the natural liberties and homely
laws of the " Barbarian " Republics reasserting them-
selves against age-old, artificial tyrannies. Ireland
cried to Russia, and Russia to Germany, and Liberty,
wakened in Ireland, has begun once more to walk the
earth.

CHAPTER VI.

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC : SOME CATHOLIC
AUTHORITIES.

Labour seeks ... to vest in the free Irish Nation
all property rights as against the claims of the individual,
with the end in view that the individual may be enriched
by the Nation, and not by the spoiling of his fellows.

— JAMES CONNOLLY in The Workers' Republic,

April Btlt, 1916.

I.

CO show that the mode of holding property under
the Gaelic State was not, and hence that under
the Workers' Republic it will not be, in conflict
with Catholic Ethics, as reactionaries declare, some
quotations exhibiting the views of Catholic authorities
on the Rights of Property will be interesting.

The following are the leading principles of the most
eminent Catholic writers : —

1. — Absolute community of possession, as theoreti-
cally advocated by doctrinaire Socialists, is opposed
solely on the grounds that, human nature being frail,
this system " would not work." Thus we read : It
is by no means right that here on earth fallen humanity
should have all things in common, for the world would
be turned into a desert, the way to fraud would be opened,
and the good would have always the worse and the bad
always the better, and the most effective means of
destroying all peace would be established, ....
Hence, such a community of goods could never benefit
the state. — John de Repa, a Franciscan authority.

Even supposing it as a principle of positive law that

54 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

" life must be lived in a state of polity " it does not forth-
with follow tJiat " therefore everyone must have separate
possessions." For peace could be observed even if all
things were in common. Nor even if we presuppose
the wickedness of those who live together is it a necessary
consequence. Still, a distinction of property is decidedly
in accord with a peaceful social life. — Duns Scotus, the
eminent Irish Philosopher.

2. — Complete communal ownership, however, is not
regarded as morally wrong. Rather it is regarded as
desirable were it only feasible. In monasteries, of
course, it is actually practised. Thus : Community of
goods is not impossible, especially among those who are
well disciplined by the virtue of philanthropy — that is, the
common love of all ; for love, of its own nature, is generous.
— Albert the Great, the father of thirteenth-century
Catholic Philosophy.

3. — Division of property is needed by human
nature in its present state, and such division draws
its validity from the State, and not directly from Xature.
Thus : Each field considered in itself cannot be looked
upon as naturally belonging to one rather than to another.
. . . Distinction of property is not inculcated by
Nature. . . . The common claim upon things is
traceable to the Natural Law, not because the Natural
Law dictates that all things should be held in common,
and nothing as belonging to any individual person,
but because, according to the Natural Law, there is no
distinction of possessions. Distinction of possessions
comes by human convention. — St. Thomas Aquinas,
the greatest of Catholic Philosophers.

4. — It being the State which gives individuals
authority to possess individually this or that field,
this or that section of the world's wealth, the State

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 55

holds the right, for the public good, to re-adjust the
property held by individuals. Thus : Just as the
division of property at the beginning of historic time was
made by the authority of the State, it is evident that
the same authority is equally competent to reverse its
decision, and return to its earlier social organisation. — •
St. Antonino.

5. — Apart from the authority of the State " to
arrange everything for the best advantage of the citizens "
[St. Thomas], ownership has in its very nature limita-
tions. Thus : The limitations of the right of Ownership
arise partly from the nature-of the goods committed to our
dominion, and partly from our own nature, which is
that of a rational and social being, (a) We must not
disregard the design of Providence concerning each
thing. To destroy a thing out of mere caprice, with no
purpose in view for oneself or for others is certainly to
disregard its end. ... (6) The moral law forbids
us to use our possessions for purely selfish motives.
Man is a social being, and must behave as such. . . .
// he possesses a superfluity, he will share with those
who are in want of the bare necessities of life. — Cardinal
Mercier's " MANUAL or SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY."
Vol. II., p. 281.

A man ought not to hold exterior things as his own,
but as common to all, that he may portion them out readily
to others in time of need. . . In urgent necessity
a man may succour his need by taking the property of
another, either openly or secretly, and this is not, properly
speaking, theft. . . . A rich man does not act unlaw-
fully if, making use of a possession which in the beginning
was common, he also shares it with others ; it is sinful
for him to withhold the use of it from others. — St. Thomas
Aquinas.

56 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

6.— Summing up the social theory of the Catholic
Ages, a modern Catholic writer says : They held .
that private property . . . was entirely lawful ; that
it was even necessary on account of certain evil con-
ditions which otherwise would prevail ; that the State,
however, had the right . . . for a just cause to
transfer private property from one to another ; that it
could, when the needs of its citizens so demanded . . .
re-establish its earlier form of common ownership. —
Bede Jarrett, O.P., M.A., in " MEDIEVAL SOCIALISM."
(Chapter on " The Schoolmen")

7. — Pointing out that " many sound reformers "
go under the name of Socialists, the standard English
Catholic Manual of Political Economy offers a test
by which a social theory hostile to Catholic tradition
may be detected : As a practical test . . . perhaps
the best is a man's affection or aversion towards owners
and holders of property. If ... he desires to
create, increase or strengthen a class of peasantry or
yeomanry [terms of different value in Ireland and
England — we in Ireland would substitute the term
small-holders], his Socialism is but nominal and
innoxious ; whereas hostility to small ownership is
a sign that his Socialism is to be labelled real and dan-
gerous.— C. S. Devas, " POLITICAL ECONOMY." [Stony-
hurst Series.]

We submit that orthodox Catholic opinion, as sum-
marised in these quotations, shows the aims of Irish-
democracy to be both legitimate and laudable.

II.

In the days when the Catholic Faith reigned unchal-
lenged in Europe, the authorities laid down three
important economic principles as the basis of social

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 57

justice. Let us see them defined, and then ask whether
the Capitalist Order or the constitution of the Workers'
Republic comes the nearer to Catholic economic ideals.

1. — The " JUST PRICE." — The Canonists laid it
down that goods must be sold, not at the price deter-
mined by the need or resources of the buyer, but at
the price fixed by their actual worth. Thus, if I buy
ten shillings' worth of raw material, and expend on
it two hours of labour and something from my reserve
of skill, I could sell the finished article, allowing for
a reasonable profit above my expenditure in material,
labour and skill, for, say, something between fifteen
shillings and £1. This would be the just price!
Now, suppose there are many artisans capable of the
same work, and that only a small demand exists for
their goods. A purchaser would not be allowed to
trade on the hunger of one to buy his article below
the " just price," i.e., at cut prices that lower labour's
remuneration. On the other hand, if I should be the
sole producer, and a buyer, urgently needing my
article, should be willing to pay me £2 or £3 for it in
his urgency, I would not be permitted thus to charge
above the " just price."

It is obvious that this. principle of the Just Price,
if enforced, would completely cripple the Capitalistic
Order, for it would end the possibility of competing
on cheap labour, or taking advantage of human need
to secure inflated profits and unworked-for dividends.

2. — The ILLEGALITY OF USURY. — The Canonists
would not allow interest to be charged on money.
Should I lend my small savings to a needy person, I
could legitimately charge him a small sum to com-
pensate me for the inconvenience that I may suffer.
But this charge is not interest. The Capitalist who

58 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

writes a cheque for £50,000 suffers no more incon-
venience by the act than if it were a postal order for
ten shillings. If the cheque is transferred from his
bank to mine, his name disappears for the time from
the Directors' Reports of some mine at the back of
the Andes Mountains, but he is not deprived of a
single legitimate object of enjoyment. His capacity
for consuming objects of enjoyment is limited, and
reaches saturation long before his bank account runs
into five figures. After that, increases in his banking
account do not mean any increase in his legitimate
happiness ; they merely gratify his love of power
over labour — a pleasure not necessary to the con-
summation of human happiness. It costs the rich
]v;cin no more inconvenience to lend £100 than it would
cost me to lend 100 shillings. If I charge 5s. for my
inconvenience, the rich man has no right to charge
more than 5s. too, despite the largeness of his loan.
For him to charge more would be to seek profit out of
dead gold instead of out of his own labour and paius.

We see, then, that the old Catholic prohibition of
interest on money did not restrict reasonable borrowing,
but it prevented men from making figures work for
them. It prevented the invisible accumulation of
wealth. Capitalism clearly could not rise so long as
this principle of the Catholic Ages ruled ; nor could
Capitalism survive if the principle were restored.

3. — The DUTY OF ALMSGIVING. — In the Catholic
Ages, the relief of the poor was not a mere counsel.
It was laid down as a duty. The State was not yet
highly-enough organised on the Continent for State
supervision of wealth distribution to prevail. More-
over, wealth was itself in but a rudimentary stage,
society being as yet not very complex. Poor people

THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 59

were easily recognised as such, and it was not neces-
sary for relief to be more elaborate than the distribution
of bread and clothes. There was no Congested District
problem, no Blind Alley Employment difficulty. Yet
the Canonists declared that the rich had no right to
consume their wealth selfishly. Their duty towards
their neighbour — their duty of sharing out their own
possessions if necessary— was asserted to be an actual
obligation.

Thus we see that the Canonists utterly denied
that right of sovereignty over Property claimed by
Capitalism to-daj^ and taught that the individual's
possessions were never so inviolable that the com-
munity had no right over or claim upon them in certain
circumstances. It cannot be doubted that the
complex needs of the poor to-day present exactly
those circumstances which, in the Canonists' doctrine,
gave the community the right to draw from the riches
of the wealthy.

We submit (i.) that the Capitalist Order as we know
it could never have arisen if Catholic economic teaching
had not been departed from, and (ii.) that the Workers'
Republic is the only constitution among the many for
which men are working which is in harmony with the
principles of the Catholic Ages.

CHAPTER VII.
AWAY WITH PARLIAMENTS.

" That Parliament is a lie, an imposture, an outrage
— a game in which our part and lot is disgrace and defeat
forever ; to Ireland it is nothing besides a conduit of
corruption, a workshop of coercion, a storehouse of starva-
tion, a machinery of cheating, and a perpetual memento
of slavery."

— JOHN MITCHEL on Westminster.

0 long as grass grows or water runs, National
Ireland will never again be seen begging at West-
minster, fighting the battle on ground chosen by
the enemy. How the Gael was betrayed into wasting
half-a-century playing with a useless weapon need
not be discussed. It is not alone that Ireland is
awake to the tactical blunder which she committed
in the period of Anglicisation ; it is not alone that
re- a wakened national dignity recoils from a policy
that involves in its very adoption the renunciation
of the prime national claim and the recognition of a
foreign authority, the taking of a perjuring oath ;
but that Ireland has turned from Parliamentarianism
with an eager resolve to follow a definite and inde-
feasible plan of campaign.

In many of the attacks made by the bourgeois
press on the policy of Abstention, the objection is
advanced, either through ignorance of Sinn Fein
propaganda, or through unscrupulous misrepresenta-
tion, that Abstention is a policy of Inactivity on the
one hand, or futile bloodshed on the other. Sinn Fein
is asked — in order to secure the support of " moderate

AWAY WITH PARLIAMENTS. 61

men " (i.e., the Anglicised bourgeoisie) — to turn from
its councils all men of advanced views.

The allegation of Inactivity is as unjust to Absten-
tionists as that of irresponsible revolution. It is
wrong to suggest that when candidates are returned
for Irish seats, pledged to abstain from Westminster,
they must henceforth twiddle their fingers when
they are not using gun and pike. The representatives
of the Irish Nation, duly elected, will, both by the
natural law and the first principles of democracy,
be the de jure National Authority. A National
Authority, with a loyal nation behind it, will have
far more constructive work ready to its hands than
any forsworn party could in a foreign parliament,
where Irish business is considered only once in a
long period, and then with six foreign representatives
ready to vote down every one Irish member. No,
the nation has not exhausted its ammunition now
that the votes are cast at the polls. The real effort
now begins.

Self-reliance will now be supplemented by self-
help. A hundred activities, authorised and co-
ordinated by the national leaders, will be launched.
Just as the farmers, by co-operation, have taken rural
reconstruction into their hands, so Ireland will take
up the task of National reconstruction, instead of
waiting for legislation to that end by a body indifferent,
when not hostile, to the object in view. The early
Manifestoes of Sinn Fein set forth a complete pro-
gramme of reconstruction, which a nation drowsed by
Anglicisation then ignored, but which the Ireland of
1919 will enter on with determination. The nation
realises now that to get a child taught Irish instead
of English, to buy an Irish suit instead of a foreign.

62 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

to get an artisan family to eat home-produced food
instead of American canned chemicals and English
biscuits, to set up a young man in a productive and
promising business, to plant a tree in the wild or
reclaim a rood of waste land, to train Irish actors and
playwrights, or to enrich an Irish fisherman with
effective equipment and offer him an inland market
for his catches, is to cut through a strand in Ireland's
bonds. Every chapter of O'Growney learnt, every
penny saved from foreign manufactures, is a brick
built into the edifice of a Free Gaelic Nation. Practical
endeavour in all these matters, and in greater issues,
though it is in many small victories that the most
effective progress will be made, is now to be organised.
English power in Ireland will be killed by denial to
it of sustenance.

In the great national boycott of the English language,
English manufactures, English institutions, Labour
will play a large — perhaps the largest — part. Labour
has practical work before it no less than Sinn Fein.
Neither is a mere agitation or a theory turned into a
party. Sinn Fein is the nation's expression of its
identity and right to Self-Determination, and its
mandate does not authorise it to declare for any specific
programme save in so far as that programme proves
to be the out-working of the Self-Determining Nation.
Once in history Capital stood for liberty. In the
Polish war against Russia a hundred odd years ago, the
capitalists — Jewish bankers — of Poland cast in their
lot with the weaker side. Were the wonder to be
repeated, and were Irish capitalists to stand in with
the nation, Sinn Fein would accept their aid. But
Irish patriotism has proved .to be solely resident in
the democracy, and Labour is the only party which

AWAY WITH PARLIAMENTS. 63

has waived its private aims for the National cause.
In the Labour movement, harmonising as it does with
reviving Gaelicism, we see the nation determining itself.
Sinn Fein, that asks all citizens to work for Ireland in
their individual ways, is by its principles and nature
bound to sanction the patriotic endeavours of the
Labour Party, and to use the weapons which a truly-
national body places in its hands. By sheer force of
patriotism, the Labour Party is engrossing political
power, and by forming — let us not say the workers but,
what is synonymous, the nation — into " One Big
Union," it is forging the most powerful weapon ever
held by the Gael. Before the united action of the
One Big Union, English capitalism, and with it, English
political power, are to be rendered impotent. The
one-day anti-conscription strike showed how a nation,
wakened by Labour to a sense of its economic solidarity,
even though deprived of political power, can assert
its will.

Just as Sinn Fein has its practical programme, so
Labour has means of direct action. The farmers by
co-operative action have found a means to trade at
a '' just price," and rid themselves of the exploitation
of a gombeen- middleman. Labour has it in its power
analogously to escape the exploitation of bad
employers. Doing away with exorbitant dividends,
high payments to non-productive middlemen, and
economically-absurd huge expenditure on advertise-
ment (for the public at present has to pay not only for
its soup and the packing, but for wildly-expensive
booming, so that the newspapers levy a tax on every
workman's meal), it will be possible for workers'
industries to undersell the capitalist, with the One
Big Union like a great National Trades Union, to

64 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

protect them against retaliation by subsidised selling
below cost price. The One Big Union will control
more than half the buying-power of Ireland, and no
tactics of capital will then divert that buying-power
from native and democratic enterprises.

In view of the passing of political power into
Labour's hands, it might be considered regrettable
that the elected authority in Ireland should have "no
specific representatives of the Labour Party in its
composition. On the other hand, it is well to remem-
ber that in speaking of the Irish Authority we are not
considering a Parliament, or even a Parliamentary
institution. For the Parliamentary institutions of the
British culture, Ireland has not, as an Irish speaker
would say, a " dog's respect." During the war, their
inefficiency as democratic organs was amply exposed.
All the civil rights upon which Englishmen prided
themselves were suppressed — only " for the period of
the war," indeed ; but at what period did the indi-
vidual need them more ? Representation was com-
pletely overruled by a self-appointed clique of three
or four men, and the boasted Parliament existed only
to vote for and ratify their decisions when told to.
The common man was robbed of conscience — forced to
give his life far overseas in causes that he knew nothing
about, and for secret treaties in the provisions of which
he had no interest. He was told at first that Tsarist
Russia was fighting beside old England for democracy
— Russia that had been a by- word for bloody brutality
up to six months before the war. The only class in
England to raise the voice of principle and conscience
— the C.O.'s — were condemned to actual torture, and
Parliament was mute. Ireland has no use for the
corrupt, inefficient and decivilising institution called

AWAY WITH PARLIAMENTS. 65

Parliament, and if her national agitation has been,
during a century, shaped as a claim for a " national
parliament," this is merely because the suppressed
Anglo-Irish Parliament offered a convenient symbol
and catch-cry. Had Irish Nationality been recog-
nised by the setting-up of a Parliament in Ireland, the
native genius would have " re-shaped it nearer to the
heart's desire."

The fault which is obvious in parliamentary institu-
tions is, that Parliament arrogates powers that it
cannot possibly exercise. It seeks to become the
Nation-in-little. It attempts to administer labour,
economics, international affairs, education, farming
and sugar distribution. It is a " Jack-of-all-trades
and master of none." To attempt to handle all the
matters which Parliament takes in hands is like trying
to add ten yards to seven ounces and divide them by
four and threepence. Seeking to deal with contra-
dictories, Parliament cannot but fall victim to the
Party System, and so to corruption. It promises every
industry and interest representation at the seat of
power, and behind this camouflage of freedom it hands
true power to a non- responsible cabal. The man
who wants Protection for his industry has to vote for
the Unionist Party, which is opposed to (say) Welsh
Disestablishment, which he happens to favour, though
he is less eager for it than for Protection ; and thus
his vote goes to strengthen in minor matters things
he hates. It is obviously absurd that an economic
theory and a sectarian problem should be cast for
with the one vote, and decided by the one body of men,
instead of by separate expert institutions.

Ireland has a different conception of the right way
to conduct a state. Mr. Figgis, in the books already

66 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

quoted, has shown how the Gaelic state devolved the
direction of the nation's many interests into the hands
of those concerned therewith, and has shown how the
Irish constitution of the future may restore this prin-
ciple. The governing body of the state will not attempt
the expert handling of the agricultural industry, as
is done in Parliaments, where men who never saw a
spade have a vote on Agricultural Bills, and must
either blunder or else blindly vote as they are asked to
by others who are seeking private ends. The Irish
State will make the agricultural industry, the educa-
tional profession, and all other great agencies of public
service, self-directing (and thus free them from being
the sport of parties), just as in ancient Ireland the
Bardic Order had its own directorate, and just as in
all ages in Ireland the Church has enjoyed autonomy.
" Just as in the old State, each council held authority
in its own concerns" writes Mr. Figgis, the philosopher
of Gaelicism, " LEAVING TO THE MONARCH THE CO-
ORDINATION OF THE WHOLE, so the modern councils
would each rule their own affairs, subject to the control
of the assembly of the Nation. There would thus be two
kinds of represen'ation gathered together. There would be
the direct representation of the Nation, and there would be
the representation of the special interests, the union and
pattern of which create the national life. Both would
meet in the Government" *

With that strange though predictable instinct
which characterises the evolution of modern Ireland,
the present political movement has begun to shape
exactly on these lines. The wise, the brave and the
good are being invested with national authority,
but there is no effort being made to override specific

* The Gaelic State in the Past and Future.

AWAY WITH PARLIAMENTS. 67

movements by the inexpert. The Labour Party, the
Gaelic League and other institutions that are not
less national than Sinn Fein itself (that are vital, too,
to the nation's welfare), are being called into council
by the nascent national authority, but no attempt
is made to appropriate their powers, usurp their
government, or dictate their measures. The liberalism
and wide tolerance that made the Gaelic State of old
so attractive to the stranger, so secure in the affections
of its citizens, are thus reappearing in the beginnings
of the Workers' Republic.

Ireland has turned her back forever on the English
Parliament, and now realises that not only is that
concern unauthorised to control so much as a hen-
run in Ireland, but that her late absorption with it
inhibited her from practical work that might have
saved half her emigrants. And her experience of that
Parliament has doubled the intensity of her resolve
to have no institution modelled upon it. She is
determined to shape her constitution in the only way
in which a Government can secure health and equity
— by adhering in all details to the dictates of nature
and tradition.

CHAPTER VIII.
ON THINKING IMPERIALLY.

Imperii dignitas non in vocabuli voce ted in gloriosae
pietatis culmine consistit.

— LEWIS II., Holy Roman Emperor.

IF Ireland secures Self-Determination from the
Peace Conference, there can be no doubt as to
the outcome. Her people will vote themselves
free forever from the Empire that was built on the
ruins of her freedom. But it may be that the Allies
and America will rule that the oldest and most illus-
trious of European nations is not entitled to the
privileges being offered to the little peoples who, up
to the last months of the war, fought loyally on Prussia's
side. In this case the struggle will be lengthened,
though the outcome will be the same. The policy of
restoring the Gaelic State by fighting the battle in
Ireland and on the social plane, instead of at West-
minster and on the political field, will go on. Against
the Competent Military Authority will be set up the
Competent Moral Authority. Sooner or later, for her
own sake, England will offer us terms. What terms
shall we accept ?

There were times in the past when we were prepared
to accept the Dual Monarchy. It is true that though
in theory there was a King of Ireland and a King of
England who happened to be the same individual,
the arrangement was always one-sided. The King
was always an Englishman — rarely by blood, indeed,
for the present Royal Family is German, but always
in manners and ideals — and never displayed one shred

ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 69

more of interest in Ireland than your insular Briton
is capable of feeling for any country but his own.
Ireland's sensibilities were always ignored and out-
raged. Only the other day the British Royal Family
insulted every Catholic in the world by contemptuously
casting off the grand old Catholic name of Guelph —
so redolent of Church history — in favour of the shoddy
title of " Windsor." Never was the English King
a man with whom an Irishman could pass a dozen
sentences. Think of any of the English monarchs
(save the Stuarts, whom the English murdered and
exiled) and you cannot select one whom you would,
as a man, invite to tea. What could you think of as
a topic of common interest for conversation ? Their
mentalities were as the Poles asunder from an Irish-
man's. They were, indeed, odd " fathers of their
people."

Yet we would accept the Dual Monarchy in former
days because kings have one use — that of offering a
serviceable camouflage for political arrangements. It
is so the English ever use their crowned heads. If it
pleased the English that their King should be King of
Ireland, if they would on that condition withdraw
their imposed force, we were not prepared to surrender
practical control of our country for the luxury of
refusing the Briton the pleasure of putting a harp
upon his coins. The " gold link of the crown " might
itself be snapt, while invisible bonds in the form of
capitalistic domination remained, and we know well
to-day that the English tongue is stronger far to hold
us in subjection than any political or economic institu-
tion ever invented. It would be foolish, indeed, to
cavil about a crown when more real things were
neglected.

70 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

To-day we demand the severing of all links because
we know England's methods better. We know that
crown or any other link will be used by England to
advance Anglicisation. We know that while she has
any trace of authority here, she will use it to recover
in the future anything that she may yield in the present.
The only concessions that we are prepared to make
are those that a free state may make by free treaty
with another. Now that England has " destroyed the
last stronghold of Militarism in Europe " and " made
the world safe for democracy," she need have no fear
of us even as an independent country. She has no
rival with whom we may intrigue (though in any case
we could have no motive for doing so), and we are
willing to give her reasonable assurances that we
will never, with our four millions, make a surprise
attack upon and subjugate her forty. Our resolve
to accept no less than the freedom thrust upon the
Jugo-Slavs is not a little strengthened by the Ally
statesman's reminder that " autumn leaves are falling."
It would be foolish to yield a compromise to the Devil
when St. Michael had him by the tail.

Our attitude to the English Empire is analogous
to our attitude towards the English Crown. In our
struggle against the Union we were prepared to accept,
after Repeal, the status held by the Ascendancy
Parliament, which was one of theoretic sovereignty
within the economic circle of that capitalistic institution
called the Empire. We philosophically accepted the
Empire's existence, even as we accepted the existence
of Original Sin. Our position was that of the Gauls
and other subjected races within the unshakable
Roman Empire. Their presence within the universal
order was no indignity, and without shame they could

ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 71

seek the most advantageous terms for themselves.
Others besides ourselves were condemned to live
beneath the gaudy emblem of the Union Jack — the
Republican Afrikanders, the democracy behind Cardinal
Mannix, the brave and cultured French-Canadians,
our kinsmen of Scotland — whose national sense is
now re- a wakening — and the mighty population of
India, custodian of one of the fairest and noblest
cultures which ever beautified the earth. Combination
between these fellow-victims might ultimately lead to
the overthrow of the cockney hegemony and release
a group of free peoples to enter the United States of
Civilisation.

The Englishman makes it impossible for the Irish-
man or any other lover of culture and freedom to
accept the English Empire save under constraint.
That Empire is based on the principle of the survival
of the vulgarest. Of all the races which inhabit its
territories the English is the most backward in culture
and morals. And yet the English claim the right to
impose their inferior institutions and their inferior
*language on all the gracious and refined peoples who
fall beneath their sway. The magnificent and charac-
teristic Mogul architecture of India is left to fall into
ruin, and colourless jerry-built imitations of White-
hall (that artistic horror) are set up in India to remind
the native that he, like the Irishman, " is not supposed
to exist." The natural modesty of decent native
peoples is outraged by the moral-less living of the
English civil servants and military garrisons which

* English is admittedly inferior to Irish in music, expressiveness,
versatility and grammar, or educational value. As a spoken
language, it is certainly inferior to the French of Quebec. Those
qualified to judge declare Bengali to be as flexible and subtle a
tongue as either Irish or French. All these ;three tongues are
threatened by that of Horatio Bottomley.

72 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

claim to represent " Christianity and civilisation."
Wherever they are not too numerous, the coloured
peoples — like the splendid race of the Maoris and the
decent folk of Australia, Africa and Canada — are
exterminated. The English Empire is the only one
which has ruled by extermination.

No people are less fitted than the English for
authority. They make excellent servants. The Sam
Wellers and Mark Tapleys are quite lovable folk.
But as in Austria (according to Lecky) so in England,
the affability and long-suffering ass-like patience of
the " lower classes " has enabled the whole direction
of the State to be appropriated by a militarist caste
or governing race, and the entire upper classes and
higher bourgeoisie of England inherit and practise the
tradition of the ascendant Normans. The domineering
and intolerant spirit of official England renders the
English the worst rulers in the world. The English
nation is so thoroughly drilled, personality and free
thought are so completely quenched, that every
untruthful formula sent out by the ruling classes is
implicitly believed. All England is convinced that
" Catholic countries are backward," " Freedom exists
under the Union Jack," " English rule is as good as
self-rule," " The Irish are lazy and quarrelsome,"
" All races are inferior to ourselves," " Nothing foreign
is worth attention," " The Kaiser caused the war,"
" England was not prepared," etc., etc. It is thus
natural that the English nation inflicts itself on all
its victims, and never " supposes them to exist."
The Englishman is incapable of respecting native
culture, as did the Germans when they built their
colonial buildings in harmony with native archi-
tectural styles ; or of endearing himself to " inferior

ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 73

black races," as did the French in Northern Africa
where black and white mingled like human brethren ;
or again, of respecting native literature as did even
Russia in the hour of her greatest tyranny, for
Mickiewicz, the Polish Davis, was feted by the Russian
literary circles when he " deported " from his own
country.

Decent Englishmen always speak sheepishly and
apologetically for their Empire, as if for a " poor
relation." No English writer of cultural status can
be found to say a word for it. There is no English
Imperial literature, no idealistic Imperial utterance
like Virgil's exhortation to Rome :

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento ;
Hae tibi erunt artes : pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.
The Englishman would be satisfied, indeed, by the
admonition, " Remember, Briton, that it is yours to
boss the world " (to venture a free adaptation of the
first line), but he would gape when the poet proceeded :
" These be thine arts : establish the ways of peace,
spare the lowly and bring the mighty down." For
the English Empire has spread not peace, but blood-
shed. Every acre has been won by violence and
retained by cruelty. The lowly have not been
" spared," but annihilated, and England has never
attacked the mighty, though when they were her
competitors she formed Leagues of Nations to attack
them for her. And what binds this Empire together ?
Force, and the imposed English tongue. During the
Great War blood was shed in almost every constituent
territory, from Ireland to Canada and Ceylon and
South Africa, and only the defeat of conscription by
Cardinal Mannix prevented blood from flowing in

74 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

Australia, too. No other Empire — not even the
Russian — was rebelled against through its length and
breadth by outraged discontents. Mr. John Dillon
asks for Ireland " her place among the self-governing
nations of the Empire." It is a lurid comment on
the illiberality of English rule that, except England,
there is not a single self-governing nation within the.
Empire. For only the English colonies are allowed
autonomy ; wherever nationality lifts its head, as in
Lower Canada, India or Ireland, the smallest vestige
of freedom is withheld. In the Englishman's Empire
there is no room for any but Englishmen — other
peoples, for him, " do not exist." Ireland might
compromise with the Empire if the Englishman would
recognise nationality within it, as Austria recognised
Hungary, and Germany Bavaria. But the English-
man's non-possumus attitude towards our nationality
renders rapprochement impossible. Ireland has learnt
from sad experience that John Bull is incapable of
an honest contract. To enter his Empire is to enter
the spider's parlour.

Seedy in origin, the English Empire is disreputable
in its objects. No great dream of civilising the world
inspires it, as the Roman, and it has crushed many
fair civilisations in its march. No moral idea,* no
creed, no vision directs its development. It has no
achievements — the world's culture and welfare are not
advanced one iota by its existence. One might accept
or tolerate it, but no man of education and principle
could ever feel one heart's beat of pride in it. It can
boast nothing but power. It is as shoddy and vulgar
as the garish Union Jack, its symbol. As we meditate
and seek a reason for so useless an institution, we
discover that one object alone founded this Empire,

ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 75

preserved it, and directed its policy and expansion —
that of amassing wealth for the ruling English caste.
To-day the Empire is solely a great capitalistic enter-
prise for the exploitation of subject peoples and their
lands. The native peoples of India and Burma and
the Indies are made to labour for a minute wage —
labour is almost a negligible part of the cost of pro-
duction, thanks to this godless exploitation of the
ignorant — for day-long hours, extorting from their
own soil its wealth in rubber and tea, and these fruits
of their land and labour enrich idlers in London with
fortunes running to millions. To protect these Quaker
investors in their dishonest undertakings, the whole
bloody machinery of armies of occupation is main-
tained, and the school-books are filled with propaganda
inventions regarding benefits conferred by English rule
upon its happy victims. This is called the " White
Man's Burden." The extortion of millions from the
Irish farmers for their own land was similarly repre-
sented as a liberal act. The English Empire is a
business proposition. But it could no more inspire
noble emotions than could a Meat Trust.

A leading " Empire-builder," who rose from
nowhere on a fortune made by manufacturing screws,
cried to the English people " to think Imperially." If
he were taken at his word the English Empire would
fall asunder, for the meanness of English Imperialism
would be thrown into relief by the true Imperial idea.
By thinking Imperially the Irish people may shame
West Britain in its proudest haunts. When Ireland
remembers the Imperialism of Charlemagne and the
Ottos, the Imperialism of the Holy Roman Empire,
the Gael will have a boast that will expose the nouveau-
riche vulgarity of English Imperialism as the true

76 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

diamond exposes the falsity of paste. When, in 801
A.D., Charlemagne, crowned by Pope Leo in Rome,
began to federate all Christendom into a mighty
Catholic Empire, the Irish High-King sent him gifts
of free accord, and in later years, though the Holy
Roman Empire never exerted military or political
power in Ireland, the Irish Brehon jurists proudly
wrote of Ireland as a constituent part of the Empire.
" When the King of Eire is ivithout opposition, he
does homage to the King of the Romans [i.e., the Catholic
Emperor] " they wrote, and in commentary, added that
the King might pay that homage to the successor of
Patrick as the Emperor to the Pope.* Observe that
here the jurists of free Ireland in her prime had the
conception of Christendom as a federated state of
states on the model of the Gaelic State itself. So that
nearly 1,000 years ago, the theory of a League of
Nations was embodied in Irish law.

It must be remembered that Charlemagne's Empire
left to every constituent race or nation its own laws
and sovereignty. Militarily it embraced Central
Europe, but nations beyond its military marches,
west and east, gave adhesion to this splendid con-
ception of a great Christian state of states. This
vision is the true Imperialism. Only by the solidarity
of the human race being established can its parts
enjoy health and liberty. Divide the world from one
empire into wholly independent empires and states,
and each will seek to strengthen itself by the subjection
of foreign man-power to oppose its competitors. A
single empire or super-state alone can prevent the
continual outbreaks of violence that come from the
swingings of the balance of power. England, with
* See Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, note to Chapter XII.

ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 77

its anti-Catholic separatism, split the unity of Christen-
dom, and consequently the existence of the English
Empire has been the source of all great wars in modern
history down to the last. But for the dominant
position arrogated by England, the German peoples,who
so long had lived as peaceful little states, would never
have been tempted to organise as a military machine.
Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy,
written in the early days of the German uprise, shows
how resentment provoked by English economic
monopolies was the chief stimulus of the German
imperial movement. Thus Continental militarism is
ever the reaction of English militarism. From her
island, England ever menaces Europe with her capital-
istic and naval power, and every nation whose fortunes
rise, sees itself condemned to a struggle with that
ruthless outsider. While one power perpetually bears
the naked sword in hand, the peaceful evolution of
Europe as a commonwealth of little nations is
impossible.

To restore the solidarity of humanity is the pro-
fessed object of President Wilson's League of Nations.
It remains to be seen how far the President's high
declarations will be adhered to by other Allied diplo-
mats, but the most sanguine could hardly hope that
English policy will effect so amazing a change of front
as to agree to the practical application even of the
Fourteen Points — except to Germany. A hundred
years ago, when the flag of democracy and the hopes
of Ireland went down at Waterloo, the victorious
Powers, at the Congress of Vienna, carved up Europe
to their liking. England forsook Poland, and Poland
vanished from the map. Holland and Belgium were
unnaturally coalesced. Sweden -was given Norway.

78 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

Prussia was given half Saxony. Austria got the
richest part of Italy. Then three European Powers
formed a League of Nations called the "Holy Alliance"
and ruled the Continent with the most edifying
professions anent the maintenance of religion, justice
and order, until in course of time all the patching of the
Congress was torn apart by successive bloody struggles.
There is no evidence at present that the coming
League of Nations will not be a mere revival of the
Holy Alliance — a League of Victors seeking to safe-
guard their gains under the name of " making the
world safe for democracy," etc., changing the formula
of the Holy Alliance to one more likely to impose on
present-day minds. The admission or otherwise of
Republican Ireland to the Peace Conference will be a
luminous evidence as to whether this is another Congress
of Vienna. The falsity of the Holy Alliance's claims
was obvious in the fact that the Alliance was based
on suppressed nationalities. The new League of
Nations will be as evil as the old if it is built on the
same foundation. No League of Nations can restore
human solidarity unless it is a League of All Nations,
each nationality having equal voting powers, as each
is an equal " moral person " — Burma having an equal
vote with Britain, and Czecho-Slovakia (or Ireland)
with France. A big nation has no more right to
more votes than a little nation than a big man has
to more votes than a little man. Unless the Peace
Conference and subsequently the League of Nations
are framed on the plan of equal recognition and equal
rights for all nationalities, we shall know that the
victors are seeking to subject the world to their
capitalistic mastery, as the Congress of Vienna and
the Holy Alliance sought to subject it to their

ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 79

reactionary and obsolete monarchies. We shall know
that the League of Nations exists to preserve the
mighty from being cast down from their seat, and
those of low degree from being exalted.

There is hope for Europe to-day that was absent
when the helpless and blind masses were re-enslaved
after the Napoleonic Wars; for to-day, although the
victor league has no effective military enemj'" left,
as happened, too, when Napoleon was beaten, it also
happens that there are new forces abroad that promise
trouble to capitalistic schemes of world-subjection.
There is Bolshevism (born in Ireland) and Nationality.
Large sections of the most advanced populations
are forming themselves into Republics. Most of these
new states are Catholic, and hence may be expected
to display a social virility and a sense of moral issues
that we seek in vain in the After-Christian communities.
Republicanism, when free from the disproportionate
centralisation of France, is congenial to Catholicity,
as is to be clearly seen from the Reformation con-
troversies, when the Protestant Kings' claims to divine
right (re-asserted to-day in the English doctrine of
state- absolutism) were controverted by the great
Jesuits by the enunciation of the law that rulers hold
authority only by delegation from the people in whom
the power to revoke it resides. In the new Republics
we may see hope for the revival of Charlemagne's
ideal of a federate community of free peoples. Catho-
licity may yet prove the force by which democracy
will establish itself in independence of Capitalism and
military might.

The dissolution of the Empires into free Republics,
and the subsequent restoration of humanity's solidarity
will find its chief enemy, as civilisation and peace

80 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

have always found it, in English pseudo-Imperialism.
It may be Ireland's part to lead in the assault which
moral force must make upon the strongholds of violence
and exploitation. In the conscription crisis, she
proved that a people strong in faith could command
resources of power that are stronger than any arms.
If the near future sees an attempt to establish Allied
Capitalism on the ruins of German Militarism, it may
be Ireland's destiny to call together the freedom-
lovers of the world. Her insistence on recognition at
the Peace Conference may blast the moral pretence
on which Capitalism is relying, and so may Ireland
" teach the world the might of moral beauty."

The rights of Small Nations are not in a just order
to be protected by strong powers any more than to be
trampled on by them. The rights of the Small Nations
are to own the earth, as it is the workers' right to own
the wealth of the nation. The strong powers are but
groups of suppressed little peoples overruled by castes,
and they have no place in civilisation until they are
dissolved into their proper elements. The little
nations are not to be " protected " ; they are to rule.
Theirs, as the Polish national poet prophesied, is the
heritage of the future. It may be international Labour
will bring them together, or it may be Catholicity.
But as surely as Capitalism is passing, having failed to
serve civilisation, so surely must pseudo-Imperialism
pass, and the Holy Roman Empire come again as a
League of Little Nations.

Let us, then, think Imperially !

CHAPTER IX.

CHURCH AND STATE.
I. — ORANGE AND GREEN.

— Yet start not, Irish- born man,

If you're to Ireland true,
We heed not race, nor creed, nor clan,

We've hearts and hands for you.

— DAVIS.

DANIEL O'CONNELL, styled "the Liberator,"
was no more responsible for Catholic Emanci-
pation than he was for the " big wind " remem-
bered by the old age pensioners. The Premier who saw
Emancipation placed on the Statute Book declared
that it was passed to prevent insurrection — in other
words, for fear of the people, not fear of O'ConnelPs
tongue. Yet, apart from Irish agitation, it is obvious
that the Penal Code could no more persist than could
stage-coaches. O'Connell, however, thrust himself
into the course of events with that torrential invective
that he had learnt from the tradition of the Anglicised
Ascendancy Parliament. The sweet charity and liber-
ality of the Gael were trampled under his feet, and
when the struggle was over, and Irish Catholics had
been granted a market for their souls in Dublin Castle,
a new situation was seen to have arisen — the situation
which brought about the Ulster Problem.

It was found that Protestant patriotism had
been alienated — frightened by O'Connell's pugnacious
" Faith-and-Fatherland " bombast. He had identified

82 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

nationality with a religious movement, and the
proud Republican faith of Wolfe Tone, that had knit
Catholic and Protestant and Presbyterian together
and terrified England with the dread of a United
Ireland, was now rejected by the " uncrowned King of
Ireland."* It would be foolish to excuse Protestant
Ireland for its recusancy. It changed its political
allegiance in thirty years. It played the coward.
But all observers of political hie know that it is bad
statesmanship to ignore prejudices and fears and the
impressionability of the common man. Disastrous
consequences like the creation of the Ulster Problem
can be brought about in quite healthy communities
when reckless and unprincipled men gain control.

O'Connell blunderingly undid that unifying of
Ireland which made such great progress in the latter
hah* of the eighteenth century. The heroics of the
Protestant Parliament and the Volunteers had been
taken quite seriously by the democracy, however
Grattan and Flood may have " kept their tongues in
their cheeks " as they posed and strutted. The
infallible economic advantages of Irish independence
were making themselves evident. The Ascendancy
Parliament's measures, feeble as they were, had been
used by a vigorous population to the full, and both
agriculture and industry were making remarkable
progress. f The United Irishmen, founded by Protes-
tants of the mettle of Wolfe Tone, and seeking to
combine with the Catholic agrarian bodies, began to

* O'Connell, who turned out in 1803 to hunt croppies, like a
Sir John Maxwell, also attacked in his speeches the men of '98.
O'Connell has a statue in Dublin. The '98 men have not.

t For proofs of the economic progress of Ireland under the
Ascendancy Parliament, see Mr. Geo. O'Brien's Economic History
of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, where the opinion of Connolly,
that the progress owed nothing to the Parliament, is examined.

CHURCH AND STATE. 83

fuse the various elements of the nation into a conscious
and determined unity. Be it noted that it was not
the Parliamentarians of the da}^ with their hostility
to Catholic Emancipation and democratic measures,
but the 'Republicans, with their " Rights-of-Man "
principles; who sought to abolish unnatural distinctions
and coalesce the nation. Yet the comrades of Wolfe
Tone nourished no mere colonial patriotism. The
Irish tongue then lived with undiminished vigour,
and there was a rich Irish life that made Ireland as
obviously foreign to an English visitor as France.
The atmosphere generated by Gaelicism was what
made of the Republicans, patriots. In short, Ireland
was still Gaelic, and her nationality was exerting all
its old powers of assimilation.

O'Connell, as we have said, changed all this. He
was one of that chain of Benthamite politicians who,
in the early nineteenth century, throughout Europe,
were striving by the methods of compromise to check
the revolutionary spirit in the interest of the bour-
geoisie. O'Connell attacked the democratic principles
of the United Irishmen, fought against trades unionism,
and, most disastrous of all, bade the Irish people
abandon their language, i.e., their culture, nationality,
and powers of absorption. Thus he struck down
democracy and Gaelicism, the two forces which alone
could make a united and free Ireland. Of the true
Catholic (i.e., " universal ") spirit, which alwa37s
characterised the unanglicised Gael, he had nothing.
True Catholicity (with a big or little " c ") abhors
sectionalism and clannishness, and wins by an easy
tolerance that attracts where militancy would only
provoke opposition. But O'Connell's rough and
unnecessary militancy gave a welcome excuse to

84 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

England's agencies of propaganda. He had repre-
sented Catholicity as a sort of tribal religion, and his
enmity to democracy gave colour to the cartoon which
showed Catholics as reactionaries and bigots. Thus
his influence was all against that Republicanism the
growth of which was Ireland 's hope.

Our prospect of re-awakening Protestant patriotism
lies in advanced democracy and Gaelicism. By com-
promise Ireland has always lost. Whenever she has
lowered the flag one inch, she has been called on to
lower it a yard. When Ireland has been completely
Irish, and has spoken out for the clear principles of
Wolfe Tone, the instincts of liberty have been awakened
in the good men of all creeds, and the beauty of the
Gaelic ideal has won their hearts. But when Irish-
men, like the Redmonds and Dillons, have made
shifty promises and poses, their unmanly attitude
has moved the contempt of those they sought to
wheedle. Nothing is to be gained by winning over
the time-servers, as the Dillons have learnt, for when
won, they cannot be relied on. The uncompromising
self-respect which wins the honour of the good, alone
is of profit. Hence, Ireland to-day does not pause
to truckle with the Protestant bourgeoisie, to argue
with the uncivilisable Mahaffys and intolerant
Bernards. She relies on her own brave stand for
Liberty to stir up whatever there is of old-time
independence in Protestant Ireland, and already there
are stirrings in the heart of Belfast of that city's
Republican tradition, forever sanctified by the martyr-
dom of Henry Joy McCracken.

The Gaelic movement alone has made more converts
to nationality in Protestant Ireland in a year than
all the life-long beggings of John Redmond. Every

CHURCH AND STATE. 85

year more and more children of the North are won by
the charm of resurgent Irish culture, and so recovered
for Ireland. Gaelicism runs in the instincts of the
Protestant democracy, and love of Ireland wakens
wherever ignorance and bigotry and greed are put
aside. The sharp-clipped, classic, sinewy Ulster Irish
(the Irish of Bedell's Bible) slips easily on to the
Ulster tongue ; the Ulsterman recognises in Gaelic
art and manners his own normal environment, and
the work of absorption goes on. Mark that all cultured
Ulster is being brought under the Gaelic banner.
The Ulsterman of refinement looks round him, and
sees that there is no living culture in Ireland save
the Gaelic, or native, culture, redolent with the odours
of his native soil. In consequence, all the spirited
and educated of Ulster's youth is growing strangely
tolerant of its own country. Unionism sees its most
hopeful recruits slipping from its ranks. It has no
culture — not an artist nor a poet — of its own ; nothing
to hold the imagination or the ideals. Thus the party
of Anglicisation in Ulster, like its Dillonite counter-
part in the other provinces, has no leaders left save
the ignorant, the fanatical, and the venal. It is
losing the only classes that could give it a future.
For a party cannot live when it has degenerated to a
mob.

II. — POLITICS AND RELIGION.

" For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood : but
against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the
world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness
in the high places." gT pAUL-

Just as no Protestant whose respect is worth
having ever respected an Irish Nationalist who was
afraid of his own nationalism ; so, too, no honest

86 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

Protestant was ever offended by an Irish Catholic
for being stoutly loyal to his Church, and there is a
middle-course between O'Connell's aggressive sec-
tarianism and that mistaken liberality which politely
ignores the fact that Ireland is a Catholic country.
It is partly the fault of seceding Protestants and
partly a mere accident of history that " Catholic "
and " Irish " are commonly used interchangeably —
that Irish speakers in Donegal, who never see a
Protestant, save a landlord or a landlord's petted man,
or a clergyman who sets his land by conacre to the
land-hungry at exorbitant rates, have but one word
for the two terms. The essential fact is, that Irish-
Ireland has never, in politics, business or social life,
imposed a religious test, and has ever been content
to see good Protestant folk win to the lead in all these
matters. The Irish Catholic takes his Faith with an
absolute disregard for controversy. It is a natural
and unconscious part of him.

To ignore the part that the Catholic Faith plays
in Irish life would be as absurd as to seek to write a
story picturing Spanish or Italian life without men-
tioning the Church. It would be like trying to paint
nature with a paint-box that lacked one of the primary
colours. Irish Protestants have to accept the fact
that they live in a country where the Catholic religion
colours the lives of the people, just as French
Protestants have to recognise the same fact ; and that
Ireland's history is a history of Catholics' doings,
just as German Protestants have to recognise the same
regarding German history. The intelligent Protestant
can accept the fact that he lives in a mainly non-
Protestant country, just as the Evolutionist can
accept the fact that he lives where the people are

CHURCH AND STATE. 87

mostly unconverted to his doctrine. But what
of the place that the Church will take in the future
Irish Republic ?

Irish history offers important lessons on the relations
of Church and State that could be studied with profit
elsewhere, and will certainly not pass unheeded among
our own people. The Irish people's fidelity to the
Church* is without parallel in the world. Persecution,
amounting to almost-successful extermination, failed
to overcome the Gael's loyalty to his ancient creed.
Bribes failed to tempt him. It is true, of course, that
his nationality was being aimed at through his religion,
and that, save as an excuse to stab at a race she hated,
England was ever indifferent to questions of Faith
in international relations. Yet, had the Irish people
after the Reformation abandoned their religion with
that unmanly surrender to material interest which
made the whole English population Protestant, they
would have shortened the road to political freedom
by three hundred years. For they would have struck
away the foundation of English craft, destroyed
England's favourite means of dividing to conquer,
and secured their land. Thus, Irish religious history
is a story of martyr-like sacrifices, of national adhesion
to ideals, that must win the admiration of all, and
puzzle the materialist philosopher, who professes to
see nothing in history but the play of economic forces,
and " the map in motion." But there is another
aspect of the story to be remembered.

It is this : Catholic Ireland's faithfulness was not
merely remarkable in consideration of the persecutions
which it resisted. Ireland's triumph was more remark-

*" The Catholic Irish People's fidelity " would be, perhaps, a
more accurate lawyer's phrase.

88 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

able in view of the temptations which assailed the
Catholic community from within. The Gael detests
political religion, and his history demonstrates that
his attitude in this respect is right for the whole world.
For can it be doubted that had the Irish people identi-
fied Church and State, as was done in England, Ireland
would have been as easily Protestantised ? Had the
Irish people confused, as others have done, the conduct
of political churchmen and of church-meddling poli-
ticians with the realities of religion, they would have
been far more strongly tempted by the attitude
towards them of Catholics than by the menaces of
Protestants. Terrible as was the Penal Code, the
injury which it inflicted on Ireland was less than the
injuries which she sustained from Catholic hands,
and indeed, as we have seen, it was itself but the final
stage in a consistent policy of extermination first
planned by Bloody Mary, England's great Catholic
queen. From the days when the invader of Ireland
secured a Papal Bull to camouflage his scoundrelly
excursion, when again an English King secured the
excommunication from Rome of the de jure and de
facto King of Ireland, Bruce, down to our own days
when " old English Catholic families " (that owe their
eminence to wealth plundered from their own Church)
continue to intrigue for the spiritual thunders of Rome
to be lent to atheistical English parties in their perse-
cutions of the Irish Nation, just so long the bitterest
and most dangerous enemies of Ireland have always
been English Catholics.

Newman, the one great and true Catholic reared
by England (though he was of foreign blood) since the
far days of St. Anselm, himself marvelled at Ireland's
indifference to the treatment she received from political

CHURCH AND STATE. 89

Catholics. " It is remarkable " wrote that saintly
scholar and gentle lover of Ireland, " that the Holy
See, to whose initiative the union of the two countries
is historically traceable, is in no respect made chargeable
by the Irish people with the evils that have resulted to
them from it . it does, we say, require some

explanation how an oracle so high and irrefragable
should have given its religious sanction to a union
apparently so unblessed, and which at the end of seven
centuries is as devoid of moral basis or of effective accom-
plishment, as it was at the commencement . . .
Adrian IV., indeed, the first Pope who countenanced
the invasion of Henry II., was an Englishman ; but
not on his Butt did Henry rely for the justification of
his proceedings. He did not publish it in Ireland till
he received a confirmatory brief from Alexander III.
Nor was Alexander the only Pope who distinctly recog-
nised it ; John XXII., a hundred and sixty years
afterwards, refers to it in his brief addressed to Edward II.
Such have been the dealings of the Holy See in times
past \n Ireland ; yet it has not thereby roused against
itself any resentful feelings in the minds of its natives."*
Political religion is like that intellectual devil so
often quoted by Edgar Allan Poe — the devil that
toiled through piles of learned tomes to demolish
one soul, " while any common devil could have ruined
thousands.'1'' It is one of the most significant facts of
history that while Ireland, in its struggle for freedom
to develop its old Christian civilisation, nay, in its
struggle for very existence, has had to fight against

* Unfinished essay on The Northmen and Normans in England
and Ireland. Newman goes on to argue that the Irish people's
Catholic loyalty is due to their attributing English persecution
to Protestantism, i.e., that they would have accepted English
supremacy had England remained Catholic. This is a mistake
due to ignorance of Irish history.

90 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

Catholic politicians, England, on the contrary, has
been constantly pampered by the same people.

England was never more than superficially Catholic.
From the foundation of the Norman monarchy down
to the actual Reformation, her history is one of enmity
to Catholic ideals. It was her separatism, in Catholic
days, that prevented the cementing of Europe into a
Christian Commonwealth. Her monarchy was anti-
Catholic from the start. King William appropriated
two-thirds of the money collected from the people
for the Pope. The second William kept vacant
bishoprics open and pocketed their revenues. It was
he, too, who refused to allow St. Anselm [Archbishop
of Canterbury] to enter communion with Pope Urban.
There was then a rival claimant for the Holy See, and
the King held that no one could acknowledge any
Pope till he himself should have decided who was the
rightful claimant. That the King's queer notion of
spiritual authority was not peculiar to himself is seen
by the fact that- when a council of the English bishops
was called on the matter, they declined to support
St. Anselm, being unwilling to conflict with the King,
and "they refused to give any advice at all."* Pre-
Reformation English history is full of similar passages.
Henry II., John, and Edward III., all fought against
Papal authority and tried to gain state control of
the Church such as was ultimately achieved when
the sixteenth century Jezebel, Queen Elizabeth, was
able to unfrock bishops who displeased her. Always,
too, the English clergy are seen willing to sacrifice
principle and compound with the State, and only the
courage of a St. Anselm or a St. Thomas forfends

* A Short History of the Catholic Church in England. Cardinal
Gasquet.

CHURCH AND STATE. 91

the Reformation. Thus Henry II., who got the
Bull to invade Ireland himself, came near to acting
Henry VIII .'s part, for his claims to rule the Church
in England were only stayed short of a rupture with
Rome by the indignation roused by his murder of his
stout opponent, St. Thomas a Becket.

Ultimately the rupture came. Henry grasped at
spiritual authority and tore the Church in England
from Christendom, subjecting it to the State. The
clergy of the country meekly acquiesced and trans-
ferred their allegiance from Peter to a royal bigamist.
The people followed suit. There was, indeed, a rising
in the North of England, called the Pilgrimage of
Grace, but My Lord of Norfolk, at the head of the
King's forces, quickly quenched that. England sur-
rendered the Faith with the same unanimous alacrity
as that with which Ireland, in the days of Patrick,
received it. Despite this discreditable religious record,
England has been unceasingly flattered, wheedled and
assisted by political Catholics. In her interests,
Ireland was betrayed not once, but many times. Our
most virtuous leaders were attacked with spiritual
weapons. Irish clerical students on the Continent
in Penal days were seduced from their nation and
educated in English ideas, and it is not wholly without
excuse (as the authority of Newman shows) that
Connolly wrote of Catholic policy, that it ever treated
Ireland in accordance with a " scheme which looks
upon Catholic Ireland simply as a tool for the spiritual
re-conquest of England to Catholicity."

The policy which sacrificed Ireland in the hope
of pacifying England was doomed to failure from the
start. The irreligious governing class in England grew
only the more arrogant when slave-Catholics worked

92 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

its will. Meanwhile, one of the wickedest falsehoods
ever imposed on Ireland by foreign propaganda gained
currency in the home country. As the Irish race was
rooted from the soil and scattered through the world,
slave-Catholics in Ireland sought consolation in the
theory that " the dispersal of the Irish people would
spread the Catholic religion," and with this excuse
they weakened their resistance to the tyranny that
was destroying the Christian State in its faithfullest
stronghold. So far from the dispersion spreading
Catholicity, an appalling percentage of the scattered
race was lost forever to the Church. England is full of
O's and Mac's who not only have forsaken Catholicity,
but lack even a half-faith like Protestantism to bind
them to morality. The fantastical creeds of America
are headed by Sullivans and O'Donnells. Owing to
the dispersion, probably one-third or more of the
Irish-named population of the world is ranked among
the neo-pagan hosts. That is what political religion
has achieved.

It has been unscrupulously argued, too, by slave-
Catholics, that the loss of the Irish tongue has recruited
the English-speaking world with a Catholic population.
The truth is that the adoption of English in Ireland
(for which no section is more responsible than the
Churchmen, who allowed Irish devotions to cease,
and brought the English tongue into the hearts of the
people by its use in the Churches) has not enriched the
English-speaking world by one great Catholic of
influence who might not have equally come from a
Gaelic Ireland. But, instead, the use of English has
thrust the vilest influences of the modern world into
the sanctuaries of Irish home life. Not only is the
English tongue materialistic in its very vocabulary,

CHURCH AND STATE. 93

but the English-written Press is vicious in both its
editorial and advertisement matter, and goes with
its demoralising influence into every Irish house every
day.

Compare the sweet lives and speech of the people
of the Gadtacht with the life of Anglicised counties,
and you may see how disastrous has been the work
of those who betrayed the sacred and God-inspired
cause of Nationality because of a plausible formula.
Let it be remembered that it was when Ireland was
Gaelic-speaking from shore to shore that all she reared
of genius, learning or virtue cast itself in impassioned
energy into the work of Christianising Europe. How
different were the legions of Gaelic scholars who poured
over France, Germany and the Balkans, preaching and
'prevailing, from the dispirited, half-educated, broken-
tongued exiles who were driven overseas in latter
years to nurse a hatred and to sink in misery and often
shame. When Ireland is a free state, the citizens of
the Republic who fare into other lands will go with a
culture and a self-respect to sustain them, and will
command attention by their bearing and their
country's fame. Instead of shrinking from the
Englishman's scorn, and concealing their religion
with their nationality, they will speak boldly of both.
Then, too, the missionary spirit will glow again in our
colleges ; and having studied the needed tongues, the
children of the Gael will go forth into India and China
and Arabia, winning hearers as sons of a race that has
never made religion a pretext for plunder, a race that
has no stain on its standard, where the whiskey-and-
Bible-bearing Briton, using religion as a pretext to
advance his capitalistic Empire, has made the name
of Christianity one to be mocked at. A distinguished

94 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

Italian visitor to Ireland* comments on " the curious
fact that the language revival is accompanied by an
intensification of missionary zeal, a re-awakening of
that ardour for winning converts to the Faith, for which
Ireland is renowned in history." Describing an
Oireachtas pageant, the same writer says : " Foreigner
though I was, I had a vague sense that something notable
for civilisation and Catholicism was maturing in the
soul of this Irish race."

Ireland's history, in contrast to England's, demon-
strates forever the ineffectiveness of the State as
an influence to promote true religion. The Irish
people have been preserved from the corruption and
anarchy of doctrine into which England fell, through
the vitally democratic nature of their Faith. The People
are the Church. Their creed is not a decree from a
caste that they sullenly obey, but a unanimous
conviction. How different is the Irish religious attitude
from the English may be realised by trying to imagine
what sort of response the Irish clergy would have
received in the sixteenth century if they, like the
English clergy, had apostatised and asked their people
to adhere to a newly-contrived code of doctrine.
Had bishops and priests gone to their flocks, saying :
" The things we have taught so long are now to be
disbelieved. The Mass is idolatry. The Sacraments
are superstitious. King Harry is head of the Church.
Yees can all believe and act as yees like," — what
answer would they have received from Gaelic clans-
man and farmer, and craftsmen and bard ? The
same that rebelly Brian-of-the-Raniparts O'Rourke,
as he went to the scaffold, made to the apostate

* Impressions of Ireland. By Very Rev. Prof. Buonaiuti, D.D.,
Ph.D., Rome.

CHURCH AND STATE. 95

Archbishop of Cashel, who talked to him of repentance :
" I think thou art a Franciscan who hast broken thy
vows."

The loyalty of the Irish clergy in those tempestuous
days doubtless owed not a little to the fact that they
were children of a democracy that had so well- diffused
and so appreciative a Faith. Do not our religious
even to-day speak of the inspiration they derive from
the devotions of the dwellers in cabins and slums ?
" I learn more from these people than I teach them,"
said the great Father Sheehan of his simple country
parishioners. The unexuberant atmosphere of the
Penal Laws is still upon us, and Irish Catholicity
has little of the pomp and architecture and incense-
burning that, on the Continent, appear to the Briton
to be Catholicity's essence. We have no sensational
conversions or controversies. Yet Catholic philosophy
as well as Catholic Faith flourish on Irish soil, and
without any profusion of advertisement, Irish scholars
have brought Scholasticism to a new life. The shrewd
instinct of a conscientious and unaffected people
guides Irish democracy aright where others, who are
ever debating formulas, would be in s withers. When
threatened with conscription by an alien authority,
the Irish People, cTaitkeasc aoin-bheoil, declared their
intention to resist it. They were denounced by
English theorists with mixed formulas about the duty
of the subject to de facto governments. Then the
Hierarchy confirmed the masses in their resolve, pro-
nouncing the invalidity of an "oppressive and inhuman
law." Were the Irish people wrong the day before,
and right the day after, the bishops' declaration ?
No, their deep Catholic instinct guided them unerringly.
But no spectacle in Ireland's history was ever more

96 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

inspiring than that of the bishops and people of Ireland
sitting in common council, and seeking in supernatural
sources fortitude for a conscientious struggle which,
either by arms or passive resistance, seemed certain
to involve more terrible suffering than would submis-
sion to the principle of foreign sovereignty. The
Maynooth Conference recalled that other at which
Columcille pleaded with the temporal leaders of the
nation.

In the Conscription Conference we may see the
norm of future relations between Church and State
in Ireland. Only when the sense of national unity
stirred the Irish race in the very depths of its emotions
could so magnificent, a demonstration of spiritual
unity be brought about. The world was shown a
great people " pledging themselves to one another "
in a common cause sanctified by a profound common
ideal. As Gaelicism brings the nation into ever closer
communion, the nation will ever more frequently
recoil upon its primary sources. We look to see, in
the future, the State taking counsel of the Church.
We shall never see it subordinated to churchmen. We
shall not tempt our clergy, as they have been tempted
in other lands. There will be none of that confusion
of the temporal and spiritual that works evil to both.
Yet the Gaelic constitution, planned on the principle
that independent and self-conducting bodies shall
come into free consultation on all national issues,
as was done in the Conscription Conference, will
prevent that disastrous alienation of the Church's
brains from the State which in other countries has
proved the alternative to political religion. In England
and elsewhere, when political churches have been over-
thrown, the State has forthwith become a wholly

CHURCH AND STATE. 97

non-moral institution, and has rejected the assistance
of statesmanlike minds among the clergy for pretended
fear of " clericalism." The Gaelic State will seek the
aid of the wise and shrewd without fear, because the
free councils of the Republic will in their nature be as
free of the party spirit as was the Conference at
Maynooth that defeated Conscription.

It follows from that courteous recognition of each
other's independence that Church and State will allow
complete freedom to their constituent members in
matters of both faith and citizenship. On the one
hand, the State will in its constitution be unable to
intrude the smallest interference into the affairs of
the self-governing Church— or Churches. It will have
no concern with the religious consciences of its people.
On the other hand, the Church will respect the privi-
leges of the State — will deny the State the services as
citizens of none of its members — and will exert the
more powerful influence in the councils of the nation,
because that influence will be wielded (as ever in
Ireland) through consultation and not coercive means.

CHAPTER X.
THE MORAL NECESSITY OF SEPARATION.

Biaidh a gcreideamh gan mhilleadh gan traochadh,
Biaidh an Eaglais ag teagasg a dtr£ada,
Braithre, easbuig, sagairt, 's cl£irchibh, —
'S biaidh sfth go deoidh 'na dheoidh ag Birinn.

— AN SlOGAIDHE ROMHANACH [1650.]

IRISHMEN of all creeds can agree upon this fact,
that the more complete a separation is effected
between Ireland and England, the better it will
be for the moral welfare of this country. It could
hardly be seriously denied that England is the most
irreligious country in the world. In backward parts
of the country the universal materialism is concealed
by a disguise of odd superstitions, like the wearing of
black clothes on Sundays. There are many places
in England where to be miserable on Sundays is a
law as rigidly observed as a savage's equally- reasonless
taboo. A superstitious dread forbids the touching of
a piano's keys or the playing of a healthy game on that
day, but there is no restriction on the reading of the
notorious Sunday Press or of the still viler stories of
the leading English novelists. Novelists in England
to-day who are read by hundreds of thousands, and
whose services are used to drill public opinion, owe
their eminence to the propagation of vice, and one of
the four leading magazines of England owes its circula-
tion to the lurid description of things unmentionable
in Ireland. During the hysterical period of the war,

THE NECESSITY OF SEPARATION. 99

old respectabilities have been torn aside, and the
English Press has admitted without shame the animal
conditions which prevail through the length and
breadth of Britain. Vices like those of Pagan Rome
in the hour of her fall have been justified with emotional
excuses, and sentimentally flaunted, and the last
shreds of the moral law have been gaily thrown to the
wind. Yet it is not the coarseness and animalism
that now are admitted to permeate English life from
the ruling classes down to the humblest conscript
that are the sole, or even the chief, menace to Ireland
in the English connection.

We may rely on the virility and refinement of an
undegenerate people to safeguard Ireland from the
grosser traits of England, but the materialism which
pervades English culture is a real danger. English
manners hypnotise all who come within their range
of influence. The honest Irishman who goes to West-
minster is, save he be of the rare irreconcilable mettle
of Parnell, overcome with the constant supercilious
parade of English might. In a place where scholars
and statesmen and literati and pressmen are unanimous
in the agreed fictions of English propaganda, he begins
to distrust himself and his simple mentors in Ireland.
In a very short time, England has enslaved his mind.
He sees the world through English eyes. Irish
Nationality becomes unreal to him. Catholicity and
its ideals seem foreign and remote. His standards are
overthrown. Useless creatures, like Nelson and Clive,
who passed through history with no achievement but
some conquest for capitalist masters, become greater
in his vision than the builders of civilisation or the
Saints of the Church. Ultimately, like Mr. Dillon, he
babbles of pride in the Empire that has been his

100 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

nation's bane. The cosmopolitan spirit of the
Nationalist is replaced with the cramped selfishness
of the Jingo.

English literature is as hypnotising as Westminster.
It carries the insular faults of English culture into
the bosom of Irish homes and schools. The constant
reiteration, directly and by suggestion, of materialist
conceptions, which marks both classic and modern
English literature, insensibly and subtly influences
the mind nourished on that literature towards a base
opinion of human motives and a despairing outlook
upon human hopes. In another place it may be
possible to examine English literature home, but the
observation will now suffice that it is a disgrace to
Catholic Ireland that Catholic schools can be found
to accept their programmes from a body that hates
all the traditions of the nation — programmes in which
the basis of literary teaching is the writings of
materialists and jingoes. If we are to have a race true
to its past, gracious and idealistic, the English literature
on which our education is based, and with it the
periodical and book productions of the modern English
Press, must be interdicted— and then replaced by the
literature of Ireland and Christendom.

It may be said that literature has a full right to
treat of the whole range of human experience, and that
moral or idealistic issues should not be introduced
in a merely literary question. This is true. But
education is not a merely literary question. The
writers which we place before youth are selected, not
solely in respect of their style or their fame, but also
writh an eye to those qualities of subject-matter which
refine and inspire the young mind, and extol those
whom we would fain have youth admire. England,

THE NECESSITY OF SEPARATION. 101

to rear an Imperial race, educates her youth on
Macaulay, so that they shall learn to admire the
character of a Warren Hastings, of whom Macaulay
wrote : " He was an unscrupulous, perhaps an unprin-
cipled statesman ; but still he was a statesman, and not
a freebooter " — a distinction without a difference. It
is surely deplorable that this same author should be
taught in Irish Catholic schools, instead of Dante and
Montalembert and Fenelon, or Ceitinn, O Bruadair
and 0 Neachtain. We cannot pretend to have the
smallest conception of what a self -deter mining Catholic
education should be, when we ignore the proud and
pure Gaelic literature of which we should be custodians,
and the mighty names of Christendom which should
be first in our minds.

If we fail for the present to secure complete separa-
tion from Horatio Bottomley's country, we can at
least, by the thorough-going revival of Irish, erect an
impenetrable wall between us and Bottomley's culture.
It is our first duty to civilisation to bring Gaelic litera-
ture back into the air of life and scholarship, and to
ensure that our students shall draw their first literary
inspirations from purely Gaelic sources. It is not
less our duty to ourselves. If this course is not fol-
lowed, English literature will completely Westminsterise
(or demoralise) our coming generations, and the Ireland
of Luke Wadding and Brother O'Clery and the Jacobite
singers will be lost beyond recovery. The establish-
ment of Irish literature as the basis of our culture
could be effected, even without free institutions, in a
few years. The Sinn Fein principle of self-help, the
principle by which the Gaels, in darker days than ours,
held fast an untarnished tradition, could effect the
salvation of Irish culture with but a small united

102 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

effort. Catholic managers and teachers could refuse,
point-blank, to carry out the work of Anglicisation
and demoralisation which is delegated to them by the
English Government. In the last resource, inde-
pendent schools could everywhere be set up — a
St. Enda's in every parish. English programmes, beside
injecting indiscriminate English literature into our
schools, also make Irish history subordinate to English
history, and conceal the whole truth about the Conti-
nent. These programmes could be rejected, and for
the present, Anglo-Irish literature (Mitchel, Ferguson,
Mangan) could be taught in their place, with Irish
history based on the books of Mrs. Green, Mr. Figgis,
James Connolly and D'Arcy McGee, and Continental
history based on the works of Ozanam and other
representative writers of Christendom.

During the transition period, too, Dante, the
world's greatest poet, could be taught through English
translations. Good Irish translations of the classics
of Christendom would be forthcoming as soon as the
demand arose. Meanwhile, teachers would make Irish
the medium of ALL teaching. This they would do by
introducing it in all their talk with their pupils. In
French classes, they would say, not, Translate into
French " Where is my hat ? " but Cuir Frainncis ar —
" Cd bh-fuil mo bhairead ? " Instead of "dismiss"
they would say " scaoilidh" Within a year, pupils
having a Junior Grade knowledge of Irish could be
brought to the standard of understanding the whole
school's discipline and procedure in the national
tongue. And as Irish thus became real and pupils
thought in the language, the time would come for the
complete substitution of Irish for English, and Irish
literature would be read with deep understanding

THE NECESSITY OF SEPARATION. 103

and profit. Even to-day, it could be taught to Senior
Grade pupils who at present learn Irish without the
literature. All this is not mere possibility. It is
what MUST be done if the last flickers of Holy Ireland
are not to be trodden out under Bottomley's heel,
but instead, re-kindled to a new life. In this work
the religious will take an important part. Already,
Gaelic culture is at its strongest and finest in the
convents of Ireland, and we may confidently expect
those, who have no peers in patriotism, devotion and
enlightenment, to perform so holy and wholesome a
task as speedily as qualified workers are available.
We may hope, too, that the pulpit, which so tragically
assisted the spread of English in Ireland, will power-
fully co-operate in the restoration of Irish. The time
should not be far when it will be possible for the Gael
in every Irish town to attend Irish- conducted devotions,
and when the former balance in favour of the English
minority will be restored in favour of the increasing
Irish minority.

In the restoration of a noble and gracious culture
in the place of one falling into corruption, all classes
should vie. And wonderful are the hopes that the
vision of a re-Gaelicised Ireland awaken. It may even
be that the religious reunion of Ireland will thus be
hastened and achieved. In the world of the Beurla,
the creeds stand apart, filled with suspicions and
misunderstandings, the work of English propaganda.
In an Anglicised Ireland, no rapprochement may ever
be hoped for. The Anglicised Protestant cannot rid
himself of the prejudices of Mahaffyism, and the
Anglicised Catholic, typified by O'Connell and the
Ancient Order of Hibernians, is not an endearing figure.
Catholic and Protestant have wandered so far apart

104 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

that they cannot find each other save by going back
to where they parted. A thing is found where it is
lost. Religious unity was lost in Ireland where
Gaelicism was abandoned. Division and sectarian
hostility have only existed where the English tongue
has triumphed.

The Gael has doubtless his full share of human
weaknesses. But the evils of actual decadence he
escaped, so long as he was free. These evils —
political corruption, jobbery, simony, vice, disbelief,
materialism — were never among the faults of which
Gaelic Ireland could be accused. They came only
with Anglicisation, of which, indeed, they are the
fruits. With them came the divisions which always
before had been escaped in Ireland. In Gaelic Ireland,
Williamite soldiers — alien in race as well as in creed —
united with those they settled among. In Anglicised
Ireland, Belfast, largely Gaelic in blood, stands aloof
with distrust and doubt.

The spiritual union of the Irish people finds its
chief obstacles in the Bernards and Greggs and Irwins,
with their lesser imitators, who inflame sectarian
passion, with blind incitements as though they were
the medicine men of a savage tribe. To the senseless,
nerve-shattering, uncivilised tom-toms of the fanatical
and ignorant drummers, these men, sacrificing truth
and charity, add impassioned denunciations that have
often led to deeds of blood. The noble faith of Bedell,
of Bunyan, of Comenius, which even the most orthodox
Catholic must respect, is, and that by educated men
to their greater guilt, reduced to a mere catchword
for reasonless hatred. Catholicity is not opposed on
dogmatic grounds — which would be susceptible of
debate — but on the grounds that it is the faith " of

THE NECESSITY OF SEPARATION. 105

the other people," of the other tribe. This sort of
Protestantism is purely totemistic. The Bernards
and Greggs, with their bloodthirsty appeals during the
War for more and more blood (" Smite, and spare
not"); their demands for conscription, which they
knew would violate the conscience of their peaceful
neighbours, and lead to appalling scenes of bloodshed
at their doors ; their sneers at Ireland's vital claims
as " trivial matters not to be raised in wartime " ;
their prating of what England would do for Ireland,
if Ireland would do this and that (as though England
were divinely appointed in loco parentis) ; their
mouthings about " the causes of truth and justice and
freedom," amply proved that they stand for unrelenting
and unscrupulous enmity to the Irish Nation.

There are Churchmen of high ideals and mild
manners, laics of honesty and piety in the Irish Protes-
tant Churches. But these churches, as institutions,
are political machines, and are not concerned wi|fh
anything that is fair or worthy in the Protestant
religion. When Bedell, that lovable soul, had an
Irish version of the Bible made, the Protestant Primate
denounced him, declaring that he remembered nothing
" at which the professors of the Gospel did take more
offense . . . whereas I wish you had advised with
your brethren before you would aventure to pull down
that which they have been so long a-building " — meaning
the discrediting and destruction of the Irish language.*
Thus did the " Church of Ireland " show itself soon
after its foundation, to be determined on the extirpation
of Irish Nationality. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century again, the Protestant Bishop of
Cloyne, writing of the small knowledge of English in
* HYDE — Literary History of Ireland, page 169.

106 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

the south, said " if it be asked why the clergy do not
learn the Irish language, I answer that it should be the
object of Government rather to take measures to bring it
into entire disuse." At the present day no occasion
is lost to oppose Gaelicism in all its forms, and to
reiterate the formulas about "the Nation" (i.e., the
forcefully-United Kingdom), and " the English-speak-
ing world," which are intended to remind the Gael that
he does not exist. English jingo festivals are celebrated
with services and speeches, and the hanging-out over
all church- buildings of the flag which symbolises the
subjection of the Irish Nation. Every opportunity is
availed of to wound the susceptibilities of the native
Irishman, and to remind any Protestant of goodwill
who may incline to charity towards the nation, that
his inclinations are regarded as treachery to his class.
In the name of religion, the Protestant Nationalist is
ostracised, outlawed, intimidated.

To despair of the Protestant Churches because
they are guided by men so intolerant, so unjust, would
be unphilosophic. There was just as much cause to
despair of Nationalist Ireland but a few years ago.
Irish Nationalism fell into the hands of men as unprin-
cipled as the Carsonite medicine-men. Yet the small
faithful minority, after patient labour, succeeded in
overthrowing the entire Party machine, and bringing
health to the national body. There is a minority of
men of clear vision and high principle that the
Protestant political machine has yet to reckon with.
The seed of the Tones and Mitchels has not perished.
Gaelicism has given to the Protestant Nationalist a
plain and sure objective. The memory of Padraig
and Colum has lit within the sullen halls long conse-
crated to hatred. The Gaelic tongue has begun to

THE NECESSITY OF SEPARATION. 107

be used in devotions of those " others that are not of
this flock, " and the hymns of O'Ddlaigh and Tadhg
Gaelach are monthly sung in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
As our own Irish Saints, our genii loci, reappear in our
memories, as the sweet vocabulary of Irish, with its
Diet's Muire and Beannacht an Leinbh comes back to
our lips, surely the new Ireland that we discover,
so fair, so free from the ugliness of the Beurla world,
will be recognised as the familiar mother of us all.
In this homely and unmistakable new-old land, shall
we not realise our essential brotherhood, and readily
drop, with the thoughts and practices of Anglicisation,
the prejudices that have sundered us ?

Let us press eagerly along the road before us, then
— the Gaelic road — for who knows but that, at the
next turn, it may reveal the beauty of the Civitas Dei
set among the Irish hills ?

CEANGAL.

have now traced the ideals that animate the
Irish-Ireland movement, and the hopes which
that movement inspires in its followers. Ireland
to-day seems to have a better chance of recovering
her freedom than at any time since the Submersion.
Should freedom come, the Gaelic ideal will be laboured
for as earnestly as freedom has been fought for. We
have not had space, so spacious has been our main
topic, to discuss the various activities that will leap
to life in free Ireland — to speak of how Irish farmers
and societies will buy ships forlreland — as the democracy
of Norway bought Norway's mighty fleet — and so
change Ireland's foreign trade from a 'passive to an
active condition, as the economists say ; nor to talk of
the beauties that will blossom forth in National art,
when Gaelicism inspires our architects to revive
Hiberno-Romanesque ; nor yet to set down the charm
that National culture will lend to social life. But it
must be remembered, that most of the activities that
freedom would bring to perfect life can live in some
struggling form even in an unfree Ireland. If Ireland
has to wait yet another space for what has been accorded
to the Czecho-Slovaks, she will not wait to press ahead,
with the strength of Self-Reliance, in economic,
social, linguistic and artistic activities that an Angli-
cised generation neglected. With the Sword of
National Boycott, Labour Solidarity, in one hand,
and the Trowel of Gaelicism in the other, the Gael

CEANGAL. 109

will labour, even while still menaced by an unfallen
English Empire, to build up the walls of the Gaelic
State — the Co-operative Commonwealth — the Workers'
Republic.

The strength of Ireland is the spirituality of her
ideal. Not for material wealth is she striving, but for
human liberty and the restoration of a civilisation
that enriched the world. Thus, the resurgent forces
of the new Republics will befriend her and seek her aid
in the reduction of the last strongholds of Capitalism
and reactionary might. The liberality, the moral
beauty of Gaelic ideals, will in turn win to her the
good men who, after all, are really in the majority
in estranged people at home. Who could decline to
follow a movement that leads to where the Children
of Patrick shall know division no more ?

It is not remarkable that Gaelicism counts for so
much, that it is a cause summing up all there is of
good in Ireland, and linking together so many seemingly
unconnected movements. The co-operative work of
Mr. George Russell ; the economics, the historical
vision, the vast schemes of National reconstruction
which lie before us like an architect's plans in the
writings of Mr. Arthur Griffith ; the researches of
Professor MacNeill ; the language and literary work
of An Craoibhin ; the world-changing teaching of
Connolly ; the tender love of the Irish Saints and fiery
passion of Padraic Mac Piarais — these and many other
labours that have called out of the Nation giants for
their performance — all work to the same end from their
distant beginnings. The reason for this unity is, that
a true unit, Irish Nationality, has awakened them.
There is really but one cause in the world, the cause
of the weak truth against the strong lie. Lenin and

110 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.

Trotsky in Russia battling against lies and force ;
Labour struggling against its self-appointed tyrants ;
the Gaelic tongue striving against the foreign jargon ;
Ireland striving against England — all are but phases
of the single war that still rages undecided, though
certain in its outcome — the warfare of the Christian
State against the Gates of Hell.

FOIRCHEANN.

7 1511

908

[This book appears as passed by Censor.]

DA 962 .038 1918

SMC

De Blbacam, Aodh,

1891-1951.
Towards the Republic : a

study of new Ireland's
AJZ-5638 (mcsk)

(ROW ML*

I

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